Abstract: The relationship between emotion and cognition in moral judgment is an important cognitive neuroscience research topic. This paper analyzed and integrated recent theories and empirical results about the effect of emotion on moral judgment, and introduced this effect from three aspects: accumulating evidence from behavior researches points to extraneous emotion can infect moral judgment, the association between emotional dysfunction and impairment in moral judgment, and the brain activation patterns in moral dilemmas in many neuroscientific studies. We focused on the neural mechanism underlying the effect of emotion on moral judgment, the interaction of the emotional processing and cognitive processing in moral judgment and the neural nature of this interaction. All the literatures in this article indicated the necessary role of emotion in moral judgment, revealed moral judgment resulted from the synergy of emotional processing and cognitive processing, and on the basis of all the evidence we proposed some new directions of the future research in this field.

Key words: moral judgment, affective intuition, deliberate reasoning, interaction of emotion and cognition