Arlene M. Stillwell

Guilt : an interpersonal approach

Multiple sets of empirical research findings on guilt are reviewed to evaluate the view that guilt should be understood as an essentially social phenomenon that happens between people as much as it happens inside them. Guilt appears to arise from interpersonal transactions (including transgressions and positive inequities) and to vary significantly with the interpersonal context. In particular, guilt patterns appear to be strongest, most common, and most consistent in the context of communal relationships, which are characterized by expectations of mutual concern. Guilt serves various relationship-enhancing functions, including motivating people to treat partners well and avoid transgressions, minimizing inequities and enabling less powerful partners to get their way, and redistributing emotional distress.

Victim and perpetrator accounts of interpersonal conflict: autobiographical narratives about anger.

Subjects furnished autobiographical accounts of being angered (victim narratives) and of angering someone else (perpetrator narratives). The provoking behavior was generally portrayed by the perpetrator as meaningful and comprehensible, whereas the victim tended to depict it as arbitrary, gratuitous, or incomprehensible. Victim accounts portrayed the incident in a long-term context that carried lasting implications, especially of continuing harm, loss, and grievance. Perpetrator accounts tended to cast the incident as a closed, isolated incident that did not have lasting implications. Several findings fit a hypothesis that interpersonal conflicts may arise when a victim initially stifles anger and then finally responds to an accumulated series of provocations, whereas the perpetrator perceives only the single incident and regards the angry response as an unjustified overreaction. Victim and perpetrator roles are associated with different subjective interpretations.

Unrequited love : on heartbreak, anger guilt, scriptlessness, and humiliation

Unreciprocated romantic attraction was explored by comparing narrative accounts. Unrequited love emerged as a bilaterally distressing experience marked by mutual incomprehension and emotional interdependence. Would-be lovers looked back with both positive and intensely negative emotions, whereas rejectors were more uniformly negative in their accounts. Unlike rejectors, would-be lovers believed that the attraction had been mutual, that they had been led on, and that the rejection had never been communicated definitely. Rejectors depicted themselves as morally innocent but still felt guilty about hurting someone; many rejectors depicted the would-be lovers persistent efforts as intrusive and annoying

Autobiographical Accounts, Situational Roles, and Motivated Biases: When Stories Don’t Match Up

Much of people’s knowledge about themselves is stored in the form of personal narratives or stories rather than in terms of abstract generalizations such as trait terms or broad principles (Gergen & Gergen, 1988). These narratives, also known as autobiographical accounts, offer a valuable tool for understanding people’s subjective experience of important life events. The narratives are of great interest in their own right, because they indicate how people reconstruct their experiences and make sense of the major events that happen to them. The narratives are also a useful means of learning about many phenomena that are not amenable to other methods of research. The difficulty of studying relationships with traditional methods makes them a prime candidate for the autobiographical methods (e.g., Harvey, Flanary, & Morgan, 1988; Harvey, Weber, Galvin, Huszti, & Garnick, 1986).