| Description |
The study's goals were twofold: (1) to examine how children's and adolescents' guilt-proneness relates to the intensity and nature of their overall distress, and changes in their distress, when they narrate experiences of hurting others; and (2) to identify how these relations vary under distinct fault conditions and across childhood and adolescence. Participants were 116 participants, evenly divided into three age groups (ages 5, 9, and 16) and by sex. Results suggest that when more guilt-prone youth narrate harmdoing experiences, they feel more current overall distress than less guilt-prone youth, but not more past distress. Contrary to expectations, these relations do not vary between youths' narration of "it was my fault" and "it was not my fault" harmdoing experiences, and do not vary for younger and older youth. Additional analyses show that more and less guilt- prone youth have different patterns of change in their current distress over the course of their narratives about harmdoings, and these changes vary by fault condition. More guilt- prone children's distress is temporally stable during their narration of my-fault harm, and their distress changes in ways that are unlikely to last when they narrate not-my-fault harm, whereas less guilt-prone children's distress decreases steadily over the course of their storytelling under both conditions. Since current and unchanging feelings of distress may interfere with narrative processes whereby children learn from harmdoings, this study's findings suggest that more guilt-prone youth of all ages may construct understandings of their past harmdoings that are problematic for their moral development. |
