Scholars have argued that prosocial behavior produces positive emotions because it fulfills basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. These explanations have largely neglected morality, despite the fact that prosocial behaviors are widely considered to be moral. To determine whether seeing oneself as acting morally—moral self-appraisals—explained this effect, we conducted a preliminary measurement study followed by three online experiments that collectively include nearly 2000 respondents. A meta-analysis of our experimental results revealed that recalling or performing prosocial behavior has a small positive effect on positive emotion (β = 0.12, p < 0.001) that is partly attributable to the fact that prosocial acts encourage positive moral self-appraisals (β = 0.61, p = 0.004) and fulfill a psychological need for relatedness (β = 0.72, p = 0.015). Our results thus indicate that people feel good following prosocial behavior in part because it encourages them to view themselves as moral individuals.

学者们认为亲社会行为会产生积极的情绪，因为它满足了自主、能力和相关性的基本心理需求。尽管亲社会行为被广泛认为是道德的，但这些解释在很大程度上忽视了道德。为了确定将自己视为道德行为——道德自我评价——是否可以解释这种影响，我们进行了一项初步测量研究，随后进行了三个在线实验，共包括近 2000 名受访者。对我们实验结果的荟萃分析表明，回忆或执行亲社会行为对积极情绪有很小的积极影响（β = 0.12，p  < 0.001），部分原因是亲社会行为鼓励积极的道德自我评价（β = 0.61, p = 0.004）并满足对相关性的心理需求（β = 0.72，p  = 0.015）。因此，我们的结果表明，人们遵循亲社会行为感觉良好，部分原因是它鼓励他们将自己视为道德个体。