Across four studies, guilt led to forgiveness of others’ transgressions. In Study 1, people prone to experience guilt (but not shame) were also prone to forgive others for past misdeeds. In Study 2, we manipulated harmand inequity-based guilt; both increased forgiveness of others’ transgressions. Further, the effect of guilt on forgiveness was mediated by identification with the transgressor. I...

OBJECTIVES Identifying mechanisms that mediate recovery is imperative to improve outcomes in low back pain (LBP). Qualitative studies suggest that guilt may be such a mechanism, but research on this concept is scarce, and reliable instruments to measure pain-related guilt are not available. METHODS We addressed this gap by developing and testing a Pain-related Guilt Scale (PGS) for people wit...

OBJECTIVE As a novel investigation of the role of White racial identity, the current study explored the link between White guilt and disordered eating. PARTICIPANTS Young adult women (N=375), 200 of whom self-identified as White. METHODS Measures assessed disordered eating, trait guilt, White guilt, and affect. RESULTS White guilt is interrelated with disordered eating, particularly bulim...

We propose that guilt proneness is a critical characteristic of leaders and find support for this hypothesis across 3 studies. Participants in the first study rated a set of guilt-prone behaviors as more indicative of leadership potential than a set of less guilt-prone behaviors. In a follow-up study, guilt-prone participants in a leaderless group task engaged in more leadership behaviors than ...

The feeling of guilt is a complex mental state underlying several human behaviors in both private and social life. From a psychological and evolutionary viewpoint, guilt is an emotional and cognitive function, characterized by prosocial sentiments, entailing specific moral believes, which can be predominantly driven by inner values (deontological guilt) or by more interpersonal situations (altr...

Both guilt and regret typically result from counterfactual evaluations of personal choices that caused a negative outcome and are thought to regulate human decisions by people's motivation to avoid these emotions. Despite these similarities, studies asking people to describe typical situations of guilt and regret identified the social dimension as a fundamental distinguishing factor, showing th...

psychoanalysts since sigmund freud have tried to discuss the role of religion in modern societies. freud himself saw religion as an illusion which had struck neurotics, while slavoj žižek viewed it as some sort of “perversion” which functioned in the cycle of law-transgression. in this essay, i dig into these theories to uncover traces of lutheran interpretations of paul’s words on the jewish l...

The present work examines the effectiveness of pairing a charitable donation with a product purchase. We propose a compensatory process, in which the guilt-laundering properties of charitable donations are more appealing the more consumption guilt is experienced. Consumption guilt is dependent on both product type (hedonic vs. utilitarian) and consumer characteristics (guilt-sensitivity), such ...

This paper examines gender differences in the consequences of combining spouse, parent, and worker roles for mental health. I suggest that work and family roles have different meanings for males and females, and that differences in the meaning of these roles may be partially responsible for why the mental health advantages of holding multiple roles are fewer for women than for men. Based on qua...