Weighed down by guilt? It's more than just a metaphor!
Researchers have found evidence that the emotional experience of guilt can be grounded in subjective bodily sensation.
"Guilt is important because it plays a role in regulating our moral behaviour," said Princeton University researcher Martin Day and Ramona Bobocel, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo.
"People often say guilt is like a 'weight on one's conscience,' and we examined whether guilt is actually embodied as a sensation of weight," they said.
In a series of studies researchers asked students and members of the public to recall a time that they did something unethical, such as lying, stealing or cheating.
Afterwards, they were asked to rate their subjective feeling of their own body weight as compared to their average.
Researchers compared these responses to participants in control conditions who recalled an ethical memory, a memory of someone else's unethical actions or who were not asked to recall a memory.
From an embodied cognition framework, researchers predicted that recalling personal unethical acts would imbue feelings of guilt that would be embodied as greater sensations of weight.
"We found that recalling personal unethical acts led participants to report increased subjective body weight as compared to recalling ethical acts, unethical acts of others or no recall," researchers said.
Researchers also found this increased sense of weight was related to participants' heightened feelings of guilt, and not other negative emotions, such as sadness or disgust.
"Although people sometimes associate importance with 'heaviness,' we found no evidence that importance could explain this finding," researchers said.
For example, ethical deeds were rated just as important as unethical actions, but only unethical, guilt-inducing memories led to increased reports of weight.
In a final study researchers also explored a perceptual consequence of the weight of guilt. Using the same materials, they tested whether recall of unethical memories would affect perceived effort to complete a variety of helping behaviours as compared to a control condition.
They found no differences between conditions for the perceived effort of the nonphysical actions.
However, those who recalled unethical memories, which can be accompanied by sensations of weight, perceived the physical behaviours to involve even greater effort to complete compared to ratings provided by those in a control condition.
The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE.
