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Feel guilty or feel ashamed? The key difference is in the direction of negative emotions. Shame is usually self-directed (“What does my behavior say about ME?”), while guilt is directed at the act (“How could I do THAT?”).
Shame usually causes disgust, a feeling of inferiority, defenselessness and powerlessness. The experience of guilt is usually not associated with such strong feelings of disgust.
Research shows that the tendency to feel guilty coincides with the development of empathy and rather positively affects the ability of a person to effectively establish interpersonal communication. Shame, on the other hand, is unrelated to feelings of empathy and can interfere with effective communication. Psychologist Matt Treeby (Matt S. Treeby) from the University of Tasmania (Australia), together with colleagues, conducted a study to find out how a person’s propensity to experience guilt or shame affects his ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions.
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- Do you know guilt?
The experiment involved 363 volunteers (266 women and 97 men) who did not have a history of neurological diseases. They were mostly undergraduate and graduate students, their age ranged from 18 to 67 years (average age 27 years).
To begin with, they were required to imagine how they would feel in each of 11 imaginary (unpleasant) scenarios. For example, in one of them, a research participant imagined that he had made a major mistake during a work project. Next, he had to choose among several statements the one with which he most agrees. Statements such as “I should have noticed and corrected the mistake” showed a tendency to feel guilty, and responses like “I want to hide from everyone” showed a tendency to feel shame. In turn, responses such as “Well, no one is perfect” showed detachment or indifference.
This was followed by the second phase of the experiment, in which participants were required to take an online emotion recognition test. They looked at photographs of the actors, in which they tried to convey certain emotions of varying intensity with the help of facial expressions. The participants had to determine which of the emotions the actor’s face expressed in each photo: joy, sadness, disgust, anger, shame or fear.
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Those participants who tended to feel guilty, on average, did better on this task – they were better at distinguishing emotions, in particular those that were weakly expressed. But the propensity to experience feelings of shame did not help to better recognize emotions.
The researchers see two likely explanations for these results. It is possible that people who are prone to guilt become especially sensitive to the possible negative reactions of others to their own behavior. But the reverse relationship is also possible – people who are initially better at recognizing the emotions of others are more likely to notice the negative reactions of others to their behavior and therefore often feel guilty.
Подробнее см. М. Treeby «Shame, guilt, and facial emotion processing: initial evidence for a positive relationship between guilt-proneness and facial emotion recognition ability», Cognition and Emotion, August 2015.