Guilt-proneness and the ability to recognize the emotions of others

Originally published by Douglas Keene.

Three years ago we wrote about the goodness of fit for the guilt-prone with the presiding juror position. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, there were a number of reasons supporting them in that role. And today, new research gives us another reason the guilt-prone may be more skilled at leadership—they are more able to identify emotions of others.

The Australian researchers wanted to see how guilt-prone and shame-prone people differed in their abilities to correctly identify the emotion experienced by others. They begin by defining the difference between guilt and shame.

“…a key difference between shame and guilt lies in the perceived role of the self in the problematic behavior. With experiences of shame, the focus of the individual’s negative evaluation is squarely on the self (e.g., “How could I have done that?”), with the transgression or failure viewed as evidence that the self is defective (e.g., “I am a terrible person”).

In contrast, the individual experiencing guilt is focused not on the self, but squarely on their problematic behavior (e.g., “How could I have done that?”) and the ways in which they may make amends for their failure or transgression (e.g., “I need to fix this”).”

While experiences of shame are highly aversive—they are also associated with feelings of “inferiority, exposure, powerlessness and a strong desire to conceal one’s real or imagined deficiencies”. Guilt, on the other hand, is described as “unpleasant and niggling, but less aversive than shame”.

Given those definitions, the researchers asked 363 students and community members (age range 18-67 years with an average age of 27.48 years; 71% White, 12% Asian, 4% Hispanic, 3% African and 10% of other or mixed ethnicity) to predict how they would feel in 11 hypothetical and negative scenarios. The scenarios were taken from a measure of what is called “self-conscious affect”. The researchers used only those scenarios measuring shame-proneness and guilt-proneness. For example, one scenario involved a big mistake on a work project and the students selected their most likely reaction. If they chose “I should have recognized the problem and done a better job”, the researchers categorized them as guilt-prone. If, on the other hand, they selected a response such as “I would feel like I wanted to hide”—they were categorized as prone to shame.

After this task, they looked at photographs of actors dramatizing different facial emotions and chose one of five emotions as best fitting the emotion on the actor’s face: happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, anger or shame. What the researchers found is this:

Those participants whose responses on the first task indicated a guilt-prone perspective were better at identifying emotions on the second task even when the emotions dramatized were lower intensity. The authors say that past research also supports their findings—in the past, guilt-prone people have been reported as having overall better than usual psychological adjustment and to have good relationship skills.

Conversely, participants whose initial responses categorized them as shame-prone were not very good at accurately identifying emotions and the authors say this is consistent with past research demonstrating shame-prone people have lower levels of empathy.

The researchers conclude that when people who are guilt-prone experience guilt following a transgression, “they remain firmly focused on the negative impact that their transgressive behavior may have had on others”. Thus, according to the researchers (and consistent with past research) the guilt-prone person is likely to be compelled to learn from their bad behavior and make attempts to repair things. Conversely, the shame-prone person is less likely to have empathy for the experience of the other—they focus so much on their “badness” that they are blinded to the feelings of others.

We view this on a somewhat less complicated level. People who feel guilt are thinking in terms of having failed the expectations of others. It is an outwardly focused, interpersonal emotion. Shame is a defensive frame of reference, focused on themselves, rather than others. People feeling guilt are concerned about the feelings of others, while those feeling shame are concerned about how they are judged by others. While our primary focus in this blog is litigation applications, this research also contains intriguing implications for hiring decisions. Which employee—guilt-prone or shame-prone— is more likely to admit a mistake, and which one is more likely to hope no one notices?  Which one is more likely to be an effective manager or team leader? Which is more likely to be proactive in the face of possible problems? Overall, you can’t beat a guilt-prone employee.

From a litigation advocacy perspective, this is an intriguing study. If indeed you can categorize people based on their responses to negative situations (like the example offered earlier on a bad mistake made at work) into either guilt-prone or shame-prone individuals—that may work well for your case. (Of course, you’d want to test this in pretrial research to see if being either guilt-prone or shame-prone worked well for your case.) If you are curious as to whether you are more guilt-prone or shame-prone or more prone to blame others for bad things that happen (i.e., externalization-prone), you can take and score the TOSCA-3 here.

Treeby MS, Prado C, Rice SM, & Crowe SF (2015). Shame, guilt, and facial emotion processing: initial evidence for a positive relationship between guilt-proneness and facial emotion recognition ability. Cognition & Emotion, 1-8 PMID: 26264817

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Related posts:

1. The GASP scale: A new measure of guilt and shame proneness
2. Should you want guilt-prone leaders for that jury?
3. Do we want convicted felons to express guilt and shame, or no?

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