Background:

Emotional gender differences have been little studied from the perspective of moral judgment. In particular, the incidence of primary moral emotions on moral judgment is unknown, and whether men and women in the face of moral horror, through pride and guilt, think differently about right and wrong.

Objective:

to identify gender differences facing the manifest moral horror of a parricide.

Methods:

descriptive explanatory study, which applied the Emotional Moral Questionnaire to 170 participants (118 women and 52 men). The reliability test of the guilt and pride subscripts was performed, whose internal consistency was good. Student’s t-test was performed to demonstrate the hypotheses about the differences between men and women.

Results:

the average value of the moral horror subscript obtained by women was higher than that of men. However, there were no significant differences in emotional moral judgment, nor with respect to rates of guilt or pride.

Conclusion:

women express greater horror at a violent moral stimulus. A certain reverse behavior between guilt and pride was observed in the participants. Gender differences, significant or not, may be due to emotional regulation.

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