Journal
EMOTION
Volume 13, Issue 1, Pages 14-18Publisher
AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC
DOI: 10.1037/a0029749
Keywords
guilt; self-punishment; morality
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Do people sometimes seek to atone for their transgressions by harming themselves physically? The current results suggest that they do. People who wrote about a past guilt-inducing event inflicted more intense electric shocks on themselves than did those who wrote about feeling sad or about a neutral event. Moreover, the stronger the shocks that guilty participants administered to themselves, the more their feelings of guilt were alleviated. We discuss how this method of atonement relates to other methods examined in previous research.
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