Moral elevation can induce nursing
This study found that the emotion of moral elevation—witnessing acts of virtuous behavior—can increase nurses' willingness to engage in caring and altruistic behaviors, suggesting that positive emotional experiences may promote professional nursing care.
Background
This is a 2008 study by Japanese researchers that experimentally tested whether witnessing altruistic acts (a phenomenon called "moral elevation") increases caring behavior. Participants who watched a video of someone helping a stranger were more willing to help an experimenter pick up dropped clothespins than those who watched a neutral or humorous video. The study uses the term "nursing" broadly to mean solicitous, helping behavior toward others. It's a niche paper in psychology/neuroscience that contributed evidence to the idea that positive emotional experiences — not just guilt or obligation — can motivate prosocial, caregiving behavior. "Moral elevation" was a term popularized by psychologist Jonathan Haidt in the early 2000s to describe the feeling of being uplifted by witnessing virtue.