The literature shows that researchers used a wide variety of types of guilt manipulation. A common feature of these studies was that the subjects were not able to doubt their guilt. Additionally, these methods did not take into account the psychometric measurement of this emotion, as well as the possibility of simultaneously inducing other feelings, such as sadness or anger. In a carefully designed experiments, we found a method that is approachable to arrange, which additionally seems to be free from these methodological flaws. In our study participants were shown an arranged message suggesting that the experimenter’s work has been destroyed. In experiment 1 (N = 44), we showed that the method proposed by us significantly affects guilt. In experiment 2 (N = 89), we replicated our result, additionally demonstrating that our procedure significantly affected only the emotion of guilt (compared to other emotions) - which is a novelty. It also has been shown that complying with the request of the victim (conditional forgiveness) makes us feel less guilty, but it does not restore liking to this person - which was established by previous research. The discussion section summarizes the results, indicates their limitations, and proposes directions for future research.
The present article is concerned with the notion of ‘guilt’ as understood by the legal sciences and in the context of psychology and culture studies. Although legal connotations are unavoidable, ‘guilt’ is a term emotionally related to other feelings like ‘shame’, ‘fear’, ‘sadness’ etc. The analysis shall take a closer look at legal definitions of ‘guilt’ and ‘culpability’ at work in the American, Polish and German legal systems and refer the equivalents existing in these languages (wina,Schuld) to the concept of guilt understood as an emotion. As it turns out, legal definitions do not account for conceptual dimension of meaning and as such, they can only serve as departure points for further analysis to be complemented with cognitive analysis. ‘Guilt’ is a culturally determined and complex emotion that may be ‘dissected’ into several more basic emotional states. The underlying assumption is that there are differences in the understanding of the concept ‘guilt’ across languages which must be taken into account by the translators who deal with translational equivalents.
The study aims to examine the role of Self-Forgiveness in shaping the Human Flourishing of the adults. Two hundred fourteen participants (18 to 30 years) comprising 100 males (Mean Age = 22.15(1.61)) and 114 females (Mean Age = 22.00(1.95)) were chosen for the study. Self-forgiveness (Mudgal & Tiwari, 2017a) and Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (Keyes, 2005) were used as the tools. Self-forgiveness comprises Realization & Reparation, Guilt, Attribution and overall self-forgiveness (sum of the first three) while Human Flourishing consists of Hedonic and Eudaimonic (Social plus Psychological) Well-Being. The aggregate of Hedonic and Eudaimonic is overall Human Flourishing. The findings suggested no gender differences in Self-Forgiveness of the participants. Conversely, gender differences were observed in all the dimensions of Human Flourishing in favour of males. Irrespective of gender, Realization & Reparation was positively correlated with Hedonic, Social, Psychological and Eudaimonic Well-Being as well as Human Flourishing except for Guilt and Attribution that showed small positive or negative correlations. Irrespective of gender, Overall Self-Forgiveness correlated positively with all the dimensions of Flourishing. Gender and Realization & Reparation emerged as the significant predictors accounting for significant variance in all the dimensions of Flourishing while Guilt and Attribution did not. The findings suggested that remorse, easy acceptance of wrongdoing, repairing the relationship with self and others, ability to minimize negative emotions towards self, monitoring others’ positive behaviours and acknowledgements of valued and close relationships were the psychological mechanisms that may underlie the predictive strengths of self-forgiveness in regulating flourishing.