Tamara J. Ferguson

Children's understanding of guilt and shame

Childrens conceptions of the self-conscious emotions guilt versus shame were investigated. In Study 1, 10-12-year-old children answered questions about scenarios that should elicit feelings of guilt and/or shame (moral transgressions and social blunders). In Study 2, 7-9- and 10-12-year-old children completed a sorting task to ascertain the features they associate with guilt and shame

Guilt, shame, and symptoms in children.

The authors asked whether evidence could be found for adaptive or maladaptive aspects of guilt and shame in 5-12-year-old children (44 boys, 42 girls). Children completed semiprojective and scenario-based measures thought to assess shame, guilt, or both. Their parents (N = 83) completed the Child Behavior Checklist to assess child symptoms. Shame and projective guilt were related to symptoms; they also were associated with self-blame and attempts to minimize painful feelings. Scenario-based guilt was related to fewer symptoms in boys but to greater symptoms in girls. This measure of guilt reflected concerns with adhering to standards, expressing empathy, and taking appropriate responsibility. Discussion focuses on possible origins of differential symptom-emotion links in boys and girls as well as measurement implications.

Priming of Mediators in Causal Attribution

According to Kelley, the process of making person, stimulus, and circumstance attributions is based on the three informational criteria of consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness. Two studies were conducted to assess how the relative accessibility of these three process-relevant criteria affected the time required to make the three attributions. Accessibility was manipulated in both studies by giving subjects a recall test (prime) for at least one of the three informational criteria. Subjects in both studies observed a scenario, after which they were primed for one or more of the three criteria and were then asked to scale one of the three attributions. In Experiment 1 (TV = 93), participants were primed for either all three process-relevant criteria or three pieces of attributionally irrelevant information. Thirty seconds after the accessibility manipulation, subjects scaled a person, stimulus, or circumstance attribution. Priming the process-relevant information decreased subsequent attribution decision time relative to the control group. In Experiment 2 (N = 137) participants were primed for consensus, distinctiveness, or consistency, after which they scaled one of the three attributions. As expected, attribution decision times were lower when all three factors were primed (Experiment 1) than when only one of the three factors was primed (Experiment 2). In addition, stimulus and person attributions were made fastest when consensus and distinctiveness, respectively, were primed. Finally, priming cognitive access to a single factor made that factor dominate the scaled attributions. These results lend support to Kelleys model, in that the priming of information presumably relevant to the attribution process reduced the time observers required to make attribution decisions.

The Relations Among Attribution, Moral Evaluation, Anger, and Aggression in Children and Adults

Retaliation by a victim, or punishment by law for an act of harm, requires judgment about the motives underlying the act, its avoidability, and the amount of harm done within a normative context (Feshbach, 1971). However, despite the recognition by several authors (Feshbach, 1971; Pepitone, 1976, 1981; Tedeschi, Smith, & Brown, 1974) that such factors contribute to an understanding of reactions to harm, relatively few analyses of aggression have explicitly incorporated these cognitive and normative considerations.

Emotional Arousal, Anger, and Aggression: The Misattribution Issue

Recent theories and research (Konecni, 1975a; & Rule Nesdale, 1976; Zillmann, 1978) have accorded anger a position of importance as a determinant of aggression. In contrast to current learning perspectives that treat anger as merely a setting condition (Berkowitz, 1971, 1974) or as irrelevant because much harm doing occurs in the absence of anger (Bandura, 1973), these recent attempts have delineated the relation between the emotional state of anger and aggressive behavior from a more cognitive orientation. Predictions in that research are based on assumptions deriving from Schachter and Singer’s (1962) theory of cognitive labeling, which postulates that people use cues present in the environment to label a state of undifferentiated arousal as a particular emotion. In our recent review of that literature (Rule & Nesdale, 1976), we have documented the observation that exposure to multiple sources of arousal, one of which is anger, either increases or decreases aggression. As the data and the specific explanations for the link between arousal and aggression have accumulated, however, it is clear that the current models of aggression and arousal and the hypotheses regarding their interrelation are incomplete. None of them, for example, provides an explication of how source attribution leads to labeling and how labeling affects response magnitude. The purpose of this chapter is to present a preliminary reconceptualization of the issues in the area by making explicit the factors we believe underlie source attribution, labeling, and response selection.