Individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) experience increased guilt. Further, these individuals often report uncomfortable sensations of things being not quite right ("not just right experiences"--NJREs). As to the relation between these psychological phenomena, it was hypothesized that feelings of guilt may enhance NJRE. In two experiments, we demonstrated that the induction of a g...

Three studies examine an emotion fit effect in the crisis communication, namely, the interaction between emotional frames of guilt and shame and consumer emotions of anger and fear on consumer forgiveness. Guilt-framing communication results in higher forgiveness than shame-framing for angry consumers, whereas shame-framing communication results in higher forgiveness than guilt-framing for fear...

Guilt is an important social and moral emotion. In addition to feeling unpleasant, guilt is metaphorically described as a "weight on one's conscience." Evidence from the field of embodied cognition suggests that abstract metaphors may be grounded in bodily experiences, but no prior research has examined the embodiment of guilt. Across four studies we examine whether i) unethical acts increase s...

Guilt is a moral emotion that is often looked upon as a negative trait. However, studies show that some individuals are more predisposed to think, feel and act in a more ethical manner because of a lower threshold to experience guilt. Some theories of helping behaviour emphasize the evolutionary mechanisms, while other theories stress the importance of social variables. This study investigated ...

Researchers postulate that both shame and guilt are emotions important to anxiety disorders. Extant data, however, indicate that guilt-proneness shares non-significant relationships with psychopathology symptoms after controlling for shame-proneness. To further investigate the relevance of shame and guilt to the anxiety disorders domain, the current study examined associations between shame- an...

PURPOSE Patients with lung cancer might feel more guilt and shame resulting from previous smoking. This study was designed to determine the levels of guilt and shame among patients with non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) compared with breast and prostate cancer. PATIENTS AND METHODS Surveys were sent to participants 3 times (at enrollment, 2 months, and 6 months). Patients were eligible if th...

Anthropomorphisms are regularly used by owners in describing their dogs. Of interest is whether attributions of understanding and emotions to dogs are sound, or are unwarranted applications of human psychological terms to non-humans. One attribution commonly made to dogs is that the "guilty look" shows that dogs feel guilt at doing a disallowed action. In the current study, this anthropomorphis...

Neuenschwander: Let me tell you how this roundtable discussion came about. I had a number of conversations with pharmacists at the June meeting about computerized prescriber order entry (CPOE). It occurred to me that, with Leapfrog pressing so hard for CPOE, hospitals are almost feeling guilty or embarrassed for not having CPOE or not being ready to have it. And yet when I would talk to pharmac...

The presence and absence of the feelings of guilt and hostility in depression had been a matter of controversy in the cross-cultural literature. In the psychopathology of depression, these feelings have been considered playing a significant role. Redlich and Freedman (1966) reported that the feelings of guilt in depressive patients were found to be associated with shame as well as unworthiness ...