Guilt-Induced Self-Punishment as a Sign of Remorse

Why do people engage in self-punishment when they feel guilty? This article aims to bridge discrepant views that portray guilt either as an adaptive social emotion that is vital to the maintenance of social relations or as a maladaptive emotion that produces a host of negative self-directed responses. An experiment investigating the impact of various audience conditions on self-punishment tendencies suggested that even the negative self-directed responses that characterize certain episodes of guilt may originally serve an adaptive social function by acting as signals of remorse.