The sense of guilt It is one of the complex emotions because, according to Izard (1979), it is evidently more late than the basic emotions and has the role of inhibiting acts considered immoral.
The sense of guilt It also makes part of the emotions defined as “moral” because it tends to promote ethical behavior by presenting itself with a negative value in response to situations in which the subject puts in place a transgression to a rule.
In particular the feeling of guilt It derives from the negative judgment of a specific act (missed or performed) aimed at another person, generating in the subject emotions of remorse and regret in reference to the previous behavior, with a consequent state of tension.
In psychology initially the sense of guilt He was studied by Freud (1915) in ‘Mourning and melancholy‘, in which the author placed the focus of analysis in an intrapsychic dimension. Starting from the middle of the century, the social level acquires greater importance: the sense of guilt Thus is related to the context in which the person is inserted. In every culture there is a certain consensus about the actions that make the guilty individualscreating a shared rule and the relative thought of what it would be right to do.
Hear one guilt It implies that the subject, by breaking this ethical rule, realized that he had the opportunity to act in another way or to act more correctly, altruistic, or socially more acceptable.
Individual availability to try sense of guiltwithout it does not turn into court or condemnation, it can prove extremely useful and adaptive, because it can open spaces of reflection on one’s behavior and can produce the activation of reparative gestures. Beyond the adaptive value of the sense of guiltit can more often assume ruminative manifestations of auto-crime, remorse or regret, up to painful forms of self-to-bearing.
In general psychopathology, feelings of guilt They characterize various disorders, both in the direction of a greater tendency to self-marmarian (the most classic case is that of depression), and-on the opposite side-as a lack of remorse or guilt (such as, for example, in antisocial personality disorder). Only within the phenomenology of obsessive compulsive disorder does the role of fault be so central that it has been investigated in the form of several constructs: propensity for guilt (Guilt Propensity), sensitivity to guilt (Guilt sensitivity) And fear of guilt (Fear of Guilt).
By “propensity for guilt” we mean the individual tendency to be subject to feelings of guilt while with the term “sensitivity to guilt” we refer to the poor tolerance towards the emotion of guilt, overestimating the negative consequences of this feeling.
Both of these variables, classically considered as individual provisions on a personological basis, showed a correlation with obsessive-compulsive symptoms (Steketee and collaborators, 1991; D’Olimpio and collaborators, 2013; forgiveness and collaborators, 2015; Melli and collaborators, 2016).
The fear of guilt It turns out to be a central construct in the phenomenology of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Studies on the experimental manipulation of the fear of guilt both in clinical subjects (eg, Shafran, 1997) and non -clinical (eg, Mancini and collaborators, 2004) have shown how it produces an increase in obsessive doubts and control behaviors. Within the studies on the construct of the Fear of Guilt In the Doc, some authors (Mancini and Gangemi, 2006) proposed a further differentiation between two fault subtypes. In general, in fact, the feeling of guilt It can be induced for the violation of an altruistic principle (altruistic fault) or for the violation of an ethical rule (ethical fault).
An example of altruistic guilt He lies in the fault of the survivor: we think of the feeling that a girl can experience in communicating the happy news of her pregnancy to the dear friend who cannot have children.
Instead of sense of guilt deontological when there is the violation of a moral rule even without damage to third parties; In this case, an example could be constituted by the sense of guilt of an individual after having implemented sexual behaviors assessed as “wrong” according to – for example – to religious principles (e.g. masturbation).
Although in many cases the two previous conditions coexist (think of the classic “betrayal” fault), there are numerous empirical evidence of the separation of the two guilt feeling described above, also on an anatomical and functional neuro base (Basile and collaborators, 2011).
In particular, the il Sense of ethical guilt It seems to activate the insula and the anterior tracked cortex, areas also connected to emotions of disgust and self-relevance; On the other hand, the altruistic guilt It is associated with an activation of the prefrontal areas also involved in empathy and understanding of the mind of others.
The hypothesis proposed and confirmed by some important Italian studies is what it is the deontological fault And not altruistic that to induce the obsessive patient to experience unacceptable doubts and implement compulsive behaviors. An experimental research (of Olimpio and Mancini, 2014) has in fact demonstrated that the induction of ethical fault, but not of the altruistic one, can activate intrusive doubts and compulsive control or washing behaviors. In addition, patients with DOC and sub-clinical subjects with high propensity to obsessions, tend to respond in a tendentially omissive way-compared to non-clinical participants-to the “Trolley dilemma” (of Olimpio and Mancini, 2015; Mancini and Gangemi, 2015).
In its original form, the “Trolley dilemma” (Foot, 1967) is based on imagining the scenario of a railway trolley that is running without control over a track towards the investment of five. The subjects subjected to the test must decide whether or not they would bring a lever capable of deviating the cart on another track by investing a single person.
The altruistic option consists in moving an exchange and causing the death of a person rather than five, while the sense of guilt deontological makes the dilemma insoluble if not deciding not to act and not change the course of events. In line with these results, other similar experimental studies have highlighted how the tendency to omission moral dilemmas positively correlated with higher scores of obsessiveness, but not anxiety.
Furthermore, the induction of the Sense of ethical guiltbut not of the altruistic one or of shame, leads the subjects to respond in a non -interventionist way in scenarios of moral dilemma (of Olimpio and Mancini, 2016). These, and many other more recent studies on the relationship between ethical fault and disgust in the DOC, are opening up ideas of important analyzes and possible hypotheses of development and application also in the psychotherapy treatment.
In conclusion, the sense of guiltlike all other emotions, can have an important evolutionary and social function. In its less adaptive or chronic forms, feeling of guilt often loses in the rooms of psychotherapy and in particular, when the patient is suffering from obsessive -compulsive disorder (or inclined to it), the emotional state of guilt becomes the feared object. Just as in the basic patient the object of concern is fear itself, the obsessive subject fears the fault.
The aforementioned research (and many others) have also shown that there is a particular type of sense of guilt More feared in the doc: it is the ethical fault, associated with the violation of a moral rule, which in the obsessive-compulsive mechanism must be avoided at any cost because it is perceived not as painful but at the same time repairable, but as a catastrophic, unforgivable and unbearable.
