All day, every day, we all experiences hundreds of emotions. Some are positive, some are negative, and all serve a purpose. Emotions prompt us into action by organizing and motivating our response. Emotions can be broken down in a number of ways. All emotions start with a prompting event, which is then interpreted. an emotional experience that occurs when a person believes or realizes—accurately or not—that he or she has compromised his or her own standards of conduct or has violated a universal moral standard and bears significant responsibility for that violation. Guilt is closely related to the concept of remorse.
For example, if you lose your job, you may interpret that to mean several things, such as: “I did not perform my duties well.” This interpretation prompts internal changes within our body, such as increased heart rate, becoming flushed, or shaking. These internal responses also lead to action urges, which we then act upon, such as crying, yelling, or escaping the situation.
After we act, there are after-effects, such as feeling distracted. This process generally happens very quickly, and can be categorized as sadness or anger.
Primary Versus Secondary Emotions:
A primary emotion is a direct reaction to a prompting event.
Secondary emotions are those we feel about our primary emotions.
For example, after failing a test, a person may feel disappointed. However, if the person feels guilty for then letting his or her parent down for failing the test, guilt is the secondary emotion because it is guilt about the disappointment.
What is Guilt?
Guilt is one of the most complex emotions that we feel. It is almost always a secondary emotion in response to a primary emotional response. Guilt is often a response to a perceived decrease in a social standing. Guilt often motivates behavior related to social expectations in that it “punishes” us for socially unacceptable behavior. Guilt is defined as a deep feeling of remorse for an act which may or may not have occurred in the past. Therefore, guilt becomes a past experience which is renewed in the present moment.
When it comes to guilt, Freud was the expert, but he certainly didn’t have a corner on the market. Guilt comes in many forms and it can be boiled down to a set of five basic types. You’ll learn what those five types are, but first let’s take a look at how psychologists define guilt.
Guilt is, first and foremost, an emotion. You may think of guilt as a good way to get someone to do something for you out of a sense of obligation. Guilt is not a very good motivator. It’s more accurate to think of guilt as an internal state. In the overall scheme of emotions, guilt is in the general category of negative feeling states. It’s one of the “sad” emotions, which also include agony, grief, and loneliness, according to one comprehensive framework.
Like other emotions, there is no one explanation for guilt. The traditional Freudian view is that guilt resides under the surface veneer of our behavior. The psychodynamic theory of Freud proposes that we build defense mechanisms to protect us from the guilt we would experience if we knew just how awful our awful desires really were. Specifically, Freud linked the feeling of guilt, and its related emotion of anxiety, to the Oedipal stage of psychosexual development.Young children, he believed, desire having sex with their opposite-sex parent. Eventually, these desires become submerged and transformed into sexual attraction toward others of their own age.
From a cognitive/behavioral point of view, guilt is an emotion that people experience because they’re convinced they’ve caused harm. In cognitive theory, the thoughts cause the emotions. The guilt of emotion follows directly from the thought that you are responsible for someone else’s misfortune, whether or not this is the case. People who experience guilt on a chronic basis, according to the cognitive perspective, mistakenly suffer under the illusion that they have caused other people harm. Their negative emotion follows from their tendency to misinterpret what happens to them an