People prone to feeling guilty have a surprising advantage

Posted on October 23, 2015

People who are more prone to feeling guilt are better at reading other people’s emotions, a new study finds.

The guilt-prone were able to read all types of facial emotions better, tests revealed. They were particularly good on relatively low-intensity emotions.

A large body of prior research links guilt-proneness with an enhanced capacity for empathy.

Apart from being better at reading facial emotions, guilt-proneness has also been consistently found to be positively associated with a host of adaptive functioning and self-regulatory outcome variables.

For example, guilt-proneness tends to be positively related to indices of psychological adjustment, is positively associated with effectively managing anger in constructive ways, appears to help inhibit hazardous and antisocial behaviours, and buffers individuals against the development of problematic substance use.

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Category(s):Mental Health in Asia

Source material from Psy Blog