The Psychological Essence Of Guilt And Shame: The Perspective Of Adjustment Orientation

As important self-conscious emotion,guilt and shame have played an important role in regulating interpersonal relationships and social conflicts.However,the existing research has little in-depth research on the influence of most of the guilty and shameful emotions on the individual's behavior,especially the motivation.Existing researches suggest that guilt will cause individuals to approach the motive,and shame will cause individuals to avoid motivation,which is similar to the effect of promotion focus and prevent focus in the regulatory focus theory.The relationship between guilt and shame and regulatory focus has not yet been explored by researchers.The study explored the relationship between guilt and shame and regulatory focus through four experiments.Study 1a induces guilty emotions and shame in individuals by means of recollection,and explores the influence of guilty individuals and shameful individuals on the regulatory focus(target accessibility).Study 1b explored the correlation between guilt-proneness shame-proneness and regulatory focus by measuring guiltproneness and shame-proneness and regulatory focus.Study 2 induces guilty emotions and shame in the individual through recall,and uses the lexical decision test as a paradigm to explore the sensitivity of individuals to vocabulary related to different types of regulatory focus under guilt and shame.Study 3 induced individual emotional guilt and shame through scenario simulation,and used information framework to explore the influence of guilt and shame on individual compensation willingness under different types of information framework.The study found that guilt can trigger individual promotion focus(target accessibility),while shame can trigger individual prevent focus(target accessibility);guilt-proneness and promotion focus are not related.There is a positive correlation between guilt-proneness and prevention focus.Shame-proneness are not related with promotion focus and prevention focus.Guilt can't improve the sensitivity of individual to promotion focusrelated and prevent focus-related vocabulary.Shame can improve the sensitivity of prevention focus-related vocabulary but has no effect on the sensitivity of promotion focus-related vocabulary.The combination of guilt and profit message framework can produce a regulatory fitting effect and enhance the individual's willingness to compensate,shame emotion combined with the loss message framework as well.