The Weight of Guilt: Scientists Discover Emotions Impact Bodily Sensation

Being weighed down by guilt may be more than just a metaphor. Scientists have now discovered that the emotional experience of guilt can actually be grounded in subjective bodily sensation. This could reveal a little bit more about how psychology impacts our bodies.

"Embodied cognition is an emerging field in psychology that examines how our thoughts and emotions interact with our bodies to guide behavior," write the authors in a news release. "Guilt is important because it plays a role in regulating our moral behavior. It can help us correct our mistakes and prevent future wrongdoing. Of course, people know that guilt feels unpleasant and is sometimes associated with feelings of tension and regret. However, we know less about the broad nature of guilt--such as how it interacts with the body and our beliefs about the body."

In order to find out a little bit more about how a body might react when someone experiences guilt, the researchers asked students and members of the public to recall a time that they did something unethical. This included everything from lying to stealing to cheating. Afterward, the researchers then asked the participants to rate their subjective feeling of their own body weight as compared to their average. They then compared these responses to participants in control conditions.

So what did they find? It turns out that recalling personal unethical acts led the volunteers to report increased subjective body weight as opposed to when they recalled ethical acts. In particular, the scientists found that this increased sense of weight was related to a heightened feeling of guilt and not other negative emotions.

That's not all the scientists found, though. In another study, they explored a perceptual consequence of the weight of guilt. Using the same materials, they tested whether recall of unethical memories would affect perceived effort to complete a variety of helping behaviors. Importantly, some of these behaviors involved physical effort. In the end, the researchers found that those who recalled unethical memories perceived the physical behaviors to involve greater effort.

"Overall, it was exciting to find these patterns of results, which are consistent with an embodied theory of emotion," write the researchers in a news release. "However, this is still relatively new research, and we are still exploring how to more fully characterize the experience of guilt."

The findings are published in the journal PLOS One.