Does Guilt Motivate Prayer?

We recruited 110 college students for an experimental investigation of the role of guilt in motivating religious behavior. We induced guilt in half of the participants before asking all subjects to indicate their current interest in prayer. Overall, participants in the guilt condition were more interested in praying, but this effect was not observed among those high in grandiose narcissism. Our findings make a contribution not only to the study of the role that emotions have in motivating religious behavior, but also to the study of narcissists’ susceptibility to guilt.     

Guilt—Freud and Buber

Using the concept of guilt as a starting point, it is the purpose of this paper to determine what relation Freud and psychoanalysis had to ethics. Buber's criticism of the view of guilt found in psychoanalysis is presented together with existential guilt. This is followed by a survey of Freud's theories of moral development, beginning with an 1897 letter to Fliess. Freud finds guilt for oedipal desires in Hamlet and real guilt is touched upon for the first time in 1906. In “Totem and Taboo”, Freud tracks down the earliest form of conscience via parricide. His last note about the sense of guilt was made in 1938. In the concluding discussion, this paper confronts and examines Freud's and Buber's approaches with emphasis on the relation to religion, neurotic and real guilt, and the ethical content of psychoanalysis.     

Marital discord and well-being in older adults: is the association confounded by personality?

The associations between marital discord and multiple measures of well-being (depression, anxiety, life satisfaction, and self-esteem) were evaluated in a population-based sample of 416 couples in which the husband was 65 years or older. Results indicated that greater marital discord was associated with greater depression and lower life satisfaction and self-esteem. Furthermore, the associations between marital discord and well-being remained significant when statistically controlling for the rival explanation of the Big Five personality traits. Finally, there was little evidence for gender differences in the magnitude of the associations between marital discord and well-being. Findings suggest that marital discord is an important correlate of multiple measures of well-being in older individuals and that this association is not confounded by the Big Five personality traits.     

Just a Game? Unjustified Virtual Violence Produces Guilt in Empathetic Players

Many avid gamers discount violent conduct in video games as morally insignificant as “it is just a game.” However, recent debates among users, regarding video games featuring inappropriate forms of virtual violence, suggest a more complex truth. Two experiments (N₁ = 49, N₂ = 80) examined users' guilt responses in order to explore the moral significance of virtual violence. In both studies, justification of virtual violence and users' trait empathy determined guilt in a structurally similar way to real-world scenarios: People felt guiltier if they engaged in unjustified virtual violence, especially if they were empathetic players. These results show that video games are capable of inducing affective moral responses in users. Accordingly, virtual violence may be considered morally significant action.     

Guilt and self-concept in ‘secondary psychopaths’

Thirty-two male and 25 female ‘secondary psychopaths’ and 24 male and 24 female ‘normal’ subjects filled in semantic differential scales relating to the concepts: Myself as I am, Myself when I lie, Myself if I were to steal, Myself as I would like to be, People who lie and People who steal. The Mosher Morality-Conscience Guilt scale and the Eysenck Personality Inventories were also administered. The psychopaths exhibited significantly higher Guilt scores than the normal subjects and had very poor self-image which was reflected in a constant feeling of guilt, regardless of whether or not they were rating transgression. Normal subjects, on the other hand, only rated themselves as feeling guilty when they violated acceptable norms. The findings suggest that guilt in ‘secondary psychopaths’ is partly related to their high level of trait anxiety and partly to their poor self-concept which may be a reflection of their disturbed family background and the constant disapproval that their behaviour creates. Since guilt in the psychopaths did not markedly increase with transgression it is argued that this may explain why guilt fails to inhibit unacceptable behaviour in some psychopaths.     

Explanation by induction?

Philosophers of mathematics commonly distinguish between explanatory and non-explanatory proofs. An important subclass of mathematical proofs are proofs by induction. Are they explanatory? This paper addresses the question, based on general principles about explanation. First, a recent argument for a negative answer is discussed and rebutted. Second, a case is made for a qualified positive take on the issue.     

Abducted by Bayesians?

This paper discusses the role of theoretical notions in making predictions and evaluating statistical models. The core idea of the paper is that such theoretical notions can be spelt out in terms of priors over statistical models, and that such priors can themselves be assigned probabilities. The discussion substantiates the claim that the use of theoretical notions may offer specific empirical advantages. Moreover, I argue that this use of theoretical notions explicates a particular kind of abductive inference. The paper thus contributes to the discussion over Bayesian models of abductive inference.     

Peers,Social Control,or Guilt? Self-Conscious Emotions as Explanation for Antisocial Behavior

Criminologists rarely include self-conscious emotions like guilt or shame to explain delinquency. Instead, factors external to the individual are often used, such as social institutions, the family, or peers. This study uses a longitudinal sample of 526 youth from two waves of survey data to assess the effects of peer influences, social control, and the self-conscious emotion of guilt on youth problem behaviors. Problem behavior is measured using teacher assessments at Time2. All other variables are baseline youth self-report measures that were collected at Time1. The results show that guilt statistically predicted teacher-assessed problem behaviors. Further work is needed to develop this measure in criminology.     

Excess use of general practitioners by obese adults: does health-related quality of life account for the association?

As general practitioners (GP) are seeing, and are likely to continue to see, increasing numbers of obese patients in their practices, it is relevant to know with which needs these patients enter general practice. The present study aims to determine whether besides physical comorbidities, health-related quality of life (HRQOL) accounts for associations of obesity with GP use. In a general population survey in Augsburg, Germany (KORA-Survey S4 1999/2001), anthropometric body mass (BMI in kg/(m(2))), physical comorbidities, HRQOL (the 12-item Short Form; SF-12), and visits to GP were assessed, and analyzed by logistic and zero-truncated negative binomial regressions (two-part model). Gender, age, socio-economic status, marital status, health insurance, and place of residence were adjusted for. The sample consisted of N = 942 residents aged 25 - 74, who had been randomly sampled from 17 cluster-sampled communities, and were either normal-weight, overweight, moderately obese, or severely obese. The moderately obese group had higher odds than the normal-weight to report any GP use; however, while being predictive, neither physical comorbidity nor HRQOL mediated this. In contrast, with regard to number of GP visits among users, the severely obese group (BMI >/= 35) reported significantly more visits than the normal-weight group, and both physical comorbidity and physical (but not mental) HRQOL accounted for this. In conclusion, physical comorbidity and HRQOL mediate excess use of GP by severely obese users in terms of number of visits. Thus, for this group, subjective physical health seems to be important besides physical comorbidities, suggesting for general practice to focus both on evaluated and perceived needs of these patients.     

Is the implicit association test immune to faking?

One of the main advantages of measures of automatic cognition is supposed to be that they are less susceptible to faking than explicit tests. It is an empirical question, however, to what degree these measures can be faked, and the response might well differ for different measures. We tested whether the Implicit Association Test (IAT, Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) cannot be faked as easily as explicit measures of the same constructs. We chose the Big-Five dimensions conscientiousness and extraversion as the constructs of interest. The results show, indeed, that the IAT is much less susceptible to faking than questionnaire measures are, even if no selective faking of single dimensions of the questionnaire occurred. However, given limited experience, scores on the IAT, too, are susceptible to faking.     

What is free association and what does it measure?

This paper reports the results of a study of free association in which participants were asked to produce the first two words to come to mind. The findings were used to estimate the reliability of indices of strength and set size for different types of items and to model free association as a retrieval task. When confined to first responses, reliability was generally high for both indices, particularly for words with smaller sets of associates and stronger primaries. When second responses were included, reliability declined. A second response added new but weak items to the set, and, when the primary associate was not produced on the first opportunity, it tended not to be produced on the second. Relative to when multiple responses are requested, first-response free association provides more reliable indices of the relative strength and set size for a word's strongest associates. A model of free association assuming that a strength distribution underlies each response provided a good fit to the data.     

Does the name-race implicit association test measure racial prejudice?

Research using the Implicit Association Test (IAT) has shown that names labeled as Caucasian elicit more positive associations than names labeled as non-Caucasian. One interpretation of this result is that the IAT measures latent racial prejudice. An alternative explanation is that the result is due to differences in in-group/out-group membership. In this study, we conducted three different IATs: one with same-race Dutch names versus racially charged Moroccan names; one with same-race Dutch names versus racially neutral Finnish names; and one with Moroccan names versus Finnish names. Results showed equivalent effects for the Dutch-Moroccan and Dutch-Finnish IATs, but no effect for the Finnish-Moroccan IAT. This suggests that the name-race IAT-effect is not due to racial prejudice. A diffusion model decomposition indicated that the IAT-effects were caused by changes in speed of information accumulation, response conservativeness, and non-decision time.     

Philosophy by Other Means?

I attempt to show that Marx was driven by a systematic philosophical goal expressed already in his doctoral dissertation and present throughout his mature political economic theory as well as in his practical political writings. I reconstruct this systematic – and critical – philosophical adventure in order to suggest that it is as philosophy that Marx's work retains its political bite today . In the process, I propose a reinterpretation of Marx's political theory that, once again, is traced through the entirety of Marx's corpus. The young Marx criticized Hegel's separation of the political from society; he then attempted to reduce the political sphere to civil society; the theory of alienated labor was elaborated as a theory of political economy that replaced the political; but in the end, when all three volumes of Capital and the unpublished Grundrisse are considered systematically, Marx sees capitalism as threatened ultimately by its inability to reflect politically on its own presuppositions, and hence its limits.     

Is It Adaptive or Maladaptive? Elaborating Conditional Role of Shame and Guilt in Development of Psychopathologies

The study aimed to explain adaptive and maladaptive functioning of shame and guilt using discomfort intolerance as a moderator. Sample comprised of 387 adolescents and young adults (51.7% females) age ranged 15–20 years. Data were collected using Frustration Discomfort Scale, Test of Self-Conscious Affect, and Youth Self-Report. Bivariate correlations showed that for the first quartile of discomfort intolerance, shame positively correlated and guilt negatively correlated with psychopathologies, whereas for the last quartile of discomfort intolerance, shame negatively correlated and guilt positively correlated with psychopathologies. Multiple linear regression analysis showed that discomfort intolerance moderates effect of both shame and guilt on internalizing problems and externalizing problems. It is concluded that shame and guilt have both adaptive and maladaptive functioning. The conditional effect of discomfort intolerance distinguishes the patterns of relationship between shame and guilt and psychopathology.     

Is there an association between lateral preference and delinquent behavior?

Results of recent research suggests an association between left lateral preference and delinquent behavior. In this study the lateral preferences of 881 seven-year-old children were determined using behavioral indicators of hand and foot use. Mixed-handedness was associated with parent-reported problem behavior scores and self-reported delinquency scores at ages 13 and 15. However, preference for left hand and foot use was found to be unrelated to the delinquency measures. The distribution of lateral preferences in an identified delinquent group was not significantly different from the distribution in the sample remainder. The lack of an association between left preference and delinquency may be accounted for by an increased cultural acceptance of individual preference.     

Trauma Following Termination of Pregnancy for Fetal Abnormality: Is This the Path From Guilt to Grief?

Termination of pregnancy for fetal abnormality (TOPFA) is a potentially traumatic event that may lead to intense grief symptomatology. The present study included 41 couples who were assessed 1–6 months after TOPFA. No gender differences were found regarding the intensity of trauma symptomatology or the prevalence of clinically relevant trauma symptomatology, present in about a third of the sample. Most couples were congruent regarding trauma symptomatology. Women experienced guilt with significantly more frequency than men. For both genders, guilt influenced both trauma and grief symptomatology. For women only, guilt influenced grief symptomatology indirectly, through trauma symptomatology. Clinical implications are discussed.