Recent research tested if guilt causes people to want to
punish themselves.
Research by June Tangney, a psychology professor at George Mason University, has examined the causes and consequences of guilt. Specifically, she finds that guilt occurs typically in response to a behavior the individual perceives as immoral. In turn, with guilt, the person doesn't make evaluations of the whole self as bad or immoral, but judges a specific action as immoral. For instance, someone might feel guilty about stealing, but this wouldn't mean, per se, that they would consider themselves a bad person, but instead, a good person who did a bad thing. (In contrast shame indicates that the person is perceiving the self as wholly bad or flawed).
But how are these feelings related to self-punishment?
In past research, emotions of guilt have been linked to such things as low self-esteem, cutting behavior, binge eating and suicide. These correlational studies suggested a link between feelings of guilt and self-punishment.
In a recent experiment, Brock Bastian, a psychologist at The University of Queensland (Australia) and colleagues tested if making people feel guilty increased their self-punishment. They had half their participants write about a time they felt bad for something they had done, or a time they interacted with someone. They then gave participants the chance to keep their arm in ice water, and then measured their guilt.
This study found that (a) people who wrote about a time they did something wrong kept their arm in the ice water longer, (b) that these people rated the experience as more painful and (c) that these people, in turn, had low levels of guilt.
In other words, the experience of punishing the self reduced people's perceptions of guilt.
