Although engineering education is often characterized as a principally rational activity, research suggests that emotions are vital for learning at all levels of education. In ethics education in particular, there is evidence that including mild emotional information in case studies can enhance learning. Evidence also suggests that specific emotions such as guilt and shame can impact on motivation to act in ethical scenarios. The place of emotions in ethics education remains controversial, however, since emotion can be perceived as a source of bias rather than as a valuable factor in learning and in motivating action. While some specific emotions have been explored in ethics research, there is a lack of empirical research addressing the relationship between ethical judgement and emotional empathy. In this research, therefore, we aimed to investigate the impact of mild emotional empathy on engineering students' ethical judgements. We conducted this study as an experimental design with 305 participants in two groups. Both groups took a modified version of the Engineering and Sciences Issues Test (ESIT) with an experimental group in which we induced a low level of emotional empathy and an emotionally neutral control group. Results show that a low level of emotional empathy does not impact participants' ethical decisions/judgments. Since the prior research evidence suggest that low level of emotional content improves learning, and given that it does not introduce biases in moral reasoning, we conclude it would make sense to include a low level of emotional content into ethics case studies
