Event Title
I'm guilty and I need to talk about it
Faculty-Student Collaboration
1
Faculty Sponsor(s)
Tom Carpenter, Ph.D.
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.
Copyright Status
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Additional Rights Information
Copyright held by author(s).
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
Comments
This poster was also presented at Society for Personality and Social Psychology Annual Convention, Portland, OR, February 2019