Guilt Feelings Make Us Feel Heavier, Literally

Sharon Moore October 11, 2013

It is often said that guilt feelings weigh us down. But this perhaps is more than an expression. According to a new study, among other negative emotions, guilt feelings can translate to a subjective feeling of weight.

The study was carried out by researchers at the University of Waterloo. They found that emotional experience of guilt can be grounded in subjective bodily sensation.

“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.” the researchers wrote. They examined whether guilt is actually embodied as a sensation of weight by asking students to recall a time when they did something unethical.

Participants recalled a variety of wrongdoings, such as stealing, cheating and lying. Then, in a separate task, they were asked to rate their subjective feeling about their own body weight as compared to their average. That is, if they feel they weigh less than usual, they weigh more, or they weigh just the same.

The results were then compared with that of students who were asked to recall a memory of someone else’s ethical or unethical actions, as well as those who were not asked to recall anything.

The researchers found that recalling personal unethical acts led participants to report increased subjective body weight as compared to recalling ethical acts, unethical acts of another person, or no recall at all. Also, the subjective increase in weight was linked only to guilt feelings and not any other negative emotions, such as sadness or disgust.

In the final study, the researchers examined the perceptual consequence of the weight of guilt. In the said experiment, participants were tested whether the recall of unethical memories would affect their perceived effort to complete a variety of helping behaviours (such as carrying groceries upstairs for someone or giving someone spare change) as compared to a control condition. They found that participants who recalled unethical memories perceived physical helping behaviours to involve even greater effort to do compared with those in the control group.

“Such results are encouraging, and hopefully this emerging line of research will lead us to a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of guilt,” the researchers said. Whilst the findings were very interesting, they said more studies are needed because this particular research field was relatively a new one.

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Can Guilt Literally Weigh Us Down?