I'm guilty and I need to talk about it

Faculty-Student Collaboration

1

Faculty Sponsor(s)

Tom Carpenter, Ph.D.

Presentation Type

Event

Project Type

Completed quantitative research study

Primary Department

Psychology

Description

We investigated how trait moral emotions (guilt-proneness, shame-proneness) predict how people speak about their past wrongs. Past research suggests that guilt and shame may have 'approach' and 'avoidance' qualities (respectively), so we predicted that guilt-prone individuals would disclose longer narratives to a researcher than shame-prone individuals. In a secondary data analysis from two large, online samples (n = 400 and 497), we found a significant correlation between guilt-proneness and word count across samples and measures of guilt (r values = .28 to .30, all p < .001). Specifically, repair tendencies significantly predicted length of disclosure (standardized B = 0.22, 0.23, p < .001), controlling for shame. Surprisingly, shame did not significantly predict word count.

Comments

This poster was also presented at Society for Personality and Social Psychology Annual Convention, Portland, OR, February 2019

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Additional Rights Information

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May 29th, 12:59 PM

I'm guilty and I need to talk about it

We investigated how trait moral emotions (guilt-proneness, shame-proneness) predict how people speak about their past wrongs. Past research suggests that guilt and shame may have 'approach' and 'avoidance' qualities (respectively), so we predicted that guilt-prone individuals would disclose longer narratives to a researcher than shame-prone individuals. In a secondary data analysis from two large, online samples (n = 400 and 497), we found a significant correlation between guilt-proneness and word count across samples and measures of guilt (r values = .28 to .30, all p < .001). Specifically, repair tendencies significantly predicted length of disclosure (standardized B = 0.22, 0.23, p < .001), controlling for shame. Surprisingly, shame did not significantly predict word count.

Rights Statement

In Copyright