Guilt in response to blame from others

Abstract

In three studies, participants rated appraisals and emotions experienced when someone else blamed them for something that was not their fault. Several participants spontaneously reported experiencing guilt in each study. Using event-contingent diaries, Study 1 found only weak correlations between rated self-blame and reported guilt when participants were blamed unreasonably. Using directed retrospective recall, Studies 2 and 3 found that guilt was higher in blamed than unblamed conditions when self-blame was low, and that the desire to apologise remained a significant predictor of guilt after controlling for all relevant appraisal dimensions. Taken together, these findings suggest that self-blame-related appraisals are not necessary conditions for the experience of guilt, and support an interpersonal analysis that sees this emotion as a strategy for repairing relationships after perceived (but not always genuine) slights.

Keywords:

• Guilt
• Self-blame
• Appraisal
• Emotion
• Relationship repair

Notes

¹These emotion items were selected to be face-valid reactions when blaming someone else or being blamed. Apart from the “guilty” item, their primary purpose was to disguise the study's specific focus on this emotion, and because the questionnaire needed to be kept to a manageable length to facilitate diary keeping, there was no attempt to sample the full possible range of emotional reactions to being blamed.

²The items were: afraid, angry, annoyed, apathetic, bored, challenged, compassionate, contemptuous, detached, determined, disdainful, downhearted, eager, fascinated, frightened, guilty, happy, hopeful, interested, intrigued, joyful, light-hearted, optimistic, pitying, regretful, relieved, remorseful, resentful, resigned, sad, scared, scornful, sorrowful, and sympathetic.

³Although Smith and Lazarus combined these items into scales, the present research assessed emotions at the item level. The main reason for this decision is that two of the items from Smith and Lazarus's Guilt Scale assess qualitatively different emotions of “guilt” and “regret”. Indeed, unlike guilt, Berndsen et al. (2004) found that regret was more responsive to intrapersonal than interpersonal considerations. At any rate, analyses based on the 3-item guilt measure revealed the same difference in guilt between the blamed and unblamed condition in this study. Other investigators have also included other items relating to appraisals or action tendencies in their self-report measures of this emotion (e.g., Tangney & Dearing, 2002). Such measures presuppose precisely those connections between variables that the present studies call into question. Nonetheless, our relational motivations measures are similar to previous measures of action tendencies, thus allowing us to demonstrate that these (as well as guilt itself) are sometimes dissociated from self-blame appraisals.

⁴The change from a 9-point scale to an 11-point scale was made to ensure consistency with Smith and Lazarus's appraisal items, which use this response format.

⁵In recent research, we have corroborated the self-report findings reported here using blamers’ third-person reports of perceived guilt in the target of blame. The new study also used a multi-item measure of guilt instead of the single item used in the present study, and found similar effects to those reported here.

⁶A reviewer of a previous version of this manuscript pointed out that people sometimes say that they are guilty when acknowledging some wrongdoing even when there is no genuinely emotional reaction. However, the guilt ratings collected in all three studies presented in this paper were given in response to explicit requests for reports of emotional reactions and the fact that other obviously emotional items were presented before and after the guilt item reinforced this instruction.