This item is intended to tap complex emotion recognition with special regard for the emotion guilt. Guilt is considered a complex emotion for many reasons. First, it tends to involve counterfactual thinking (see description of item 29). When someone experiences the emotion guilt, “they reflect on how past events might have otherwise unfolded had some aspect of the situation or their behavior been different. The mental simulation of alternative outcomes appears to guide individual’s attribution about the causes of actual outcomes” (Neidenthal, Tangney, & Gavanski, 1994, p. 585). In addition, guilt is a complex emotion because it can involve the recognition of a negative appraisal of an audience (Barrett, 1995). When an audience is involved, guilt is considered a ‘social’ emotion (Kasari, Chamberlain, & Bauminger, 2001) as well as a second-order emotion because it requires an appraisal of another’s view of oneself. Yet, guilt can be experienced when no audience is present and when construed thusly, it is generally referred to as a ‘self-evaluative’ emotion (Mascolo & Fischer, 1995).
Researchers have spent some time distinguishing guilt from shame. Guilt and shame are often grouped together in the class of ‘moral emotions’ because of their presumed role in fostering moral behavior and (if absent) moral transgressions (Tangney, 1995). They are also members of the family of ‘self-conscious’ emotions “in that they each involve self-referential processes with respect to some standard of behavior” (Tangney, 1995, p. 115). But whereas shame involves feelings of self-condemnation in which the self is seen as the root of failure, guilt involves the condemnation of an unacceptable behavior (or failure to act), somewhat apart from the self. In essence, shame involves a negative evaluation of the self (e.g., “If only I were stronger”) whereas guilt involves a negative evaluation of a specific behavior or misdeed (e.g., “If only I had told the truth”) (Barrett, 1995; Niedenthal, Tangney, & Gavanski, 1994).
Broadly speaking, the functional role of guilt is to motivate reparative action (Barrett, 1995). When an audience is involved, a related function is to communicate contrition and good intentions and to seek forgiveness so as to preserve social relationships. Guilt can also serve internal regulatory functions. Through emphasis on the act of wrongdoing, the importance of moral standards is highlighted so that these might be achieved in the future (Barrett, 1995).
The development of guilt is protracted and highly dependent on socialization experiences. As Barrett (1995) explained:
“Socialization is important to the development of…guilt not only because it is important source of information about rules, standards, self, and so on; more importantly it is primarily responsible for endowing those standards with significance, and making adherence to those standards an important goal for the individual. Significance is a crucial feature distinguishing appreciations from ordinary cognitive processes. A person can be aware that the speed limit is 55 miles per hour and that he or she is driving 65 miles per hour…but unless abiding by the speed limit is a significant goal for the person, he or she should not experience guilt” (p. 50-51)
Compared to primary or basic emotions (e.g., happy, sad), complex social emotions like guilt are understood later in typical development (Adolphs, Baron-Cohen, & Tranel, 2002; Begeer et al., 2014; Bennett & Matthews, 2000; Buss et al., 1979). In line with the literature on the development of moral reasoning, some researchers have proposed a stage theory of the development of guilt that spans a period from late infancy to early adulthood (e.g., Mascolo & Fischer, 1995). The steps in the sequence describe increasingly complex ways of being responsible for distress in others. Development in the processing of social emotions like guilt are related to the capacity for producing increasingly elaborate representations of people and social relationships and “the maturation of the social brain network” that occurs in adolescence (Klapwijk, Goddings, Heyes, Bird, & Viner, 2013, p. 314) and beyond (Burnett, Bird, Moll, Frith, & Blakemore, 2009). As such, there is good justification for the recognition of guilt as an Advanced theory of mind competency.
Recognition of ‘Guilt’ in ASD
In ASD, the understanding of the emotion guilt is associated with general cognitive ability (Kasari, Chamberlain, & Bauminger [2000] as cited in Kasari, Chamberlain, & Bauminger, 2001). The development of guilt is tied to socialization experiences such that children with ASD may “have reduced opportunities to learn about themselves and others and to understand standards and rules for behavior and for their personal responsibility” (Kasari et al., 2001, p. 318). With regard to reasoning and reporting experiences of guilt, several researchers have found that, compared to age and language-matched peers, children with ASD are less able to describe their previous experiences with social emotions including guilt (Capps, Yirmiya, & Sigman, 1992; Kasari et al., 2000, as cited in Kasari et al., 2001; Losh & Capps, 2006; but see Williams & Happé, 2010 for contrary findings). For example Kasari et al. (2000, as cited in Kasari et al., 2001) demonstrated that although children with ASD report a similar frequency of experiencing guilt, they have more difficulty providing examples of guilt. In their study, children with ASD made proportionally fewer self-evaluative comments, were more likely to describe situations of rule-breaking, disruptiveness, and property damage and less likely to report feeling guilt over causing physical or emotional harm to others. Kasari et al. (2001) argued that, in ASD, guilt may be defined not in interpersonal empathetic terms but in terms of memorizable rules and actions toward things (e.g., stealing cookies, running away).
With specific regard to emotion recognition, prior findings with a standardized set of stimuli indicated that recognition of social emotions can be signaled by the eye region of the face and is disproportionally impaired in ASD (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, & Jolliffe, 1997). On the other hand, Baron-Cohen et al. (1997) did not separately analyze data for the emotion guilt which appear to indicate that 1) guilt was one of the most difficult social emotions to recognize among children with ASD and typically developing children and 2) the between-group differences were slight and unlikely to be statistically significant. In a similar vein, Williams and Happé (2010) found no differences between children with ASD and age and language-matched children with learning disability on tasks assessing the recognition of social emotions including guilt. For both groups, they also found that the ability to report social-emotional experiences was strongly correlated with the recognition of social emotions in others. These findings lead Williams and Happé (2010) to conclude that “the understanding of emotions amongst individuals with autism in daily life appears diminished and atypical. However, what emerges…from a small but growing number of recent studies, is that children with autism probably can understand (even) social emotions in certain contexts” (p. 301). In contrast to Kasari et al. (2001) who underscored the possibility of guilt being understood in terms of memorized rules and behavioral actions, Williams and Happé (2010) concluded that the understanding of guilt (in their arguably more able sample) “appears to be based on principles similar to those on which understanding is based amongst individuals without autism” (p. 301).
Recognition of ‘Guilt’ in ADHD
Given the deficits documented in the recognition of basic emotions in ADHD (e.g., sad, mad, scared; see descriptions of items 48, 49, 50 respectively), deficits in later-emerging complex emotions seems likely. Very few studies have examined complex emotion recognition in ADHD and most that have make use of the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET; Baron-Cohen et al., 1997) in which a variety of emotions are identified by viewing static images of the eye region of the face. Three studies have found no differences between typically developing (TD) and children with ADHD children in their ability to identify emotions (basic and complex which were combined to yield aggregate data) on this structured task when groups were matched or later corrected for age and IQ (Baribeau et al., 2015; Demurie, De Corel, & Roeyers, 2011; Gonzalez-Gadea et al., 2013). Using a different approach, Hutchins et al. (2016) compared typically developing (TD) males, males with ASD, and males with ADHD for their comprehension of complex emotions including guilt using caregiver report (i.e., the Theory of Mind Inventory). Results revealed no statistically significant differences between the ASD and ADHD groups with both groups receiving significantly lower scores compared to the TD sample. These findings suggest that children with ADHD are at risk for poor complex emotion recognition as measured by caregivers’ perceptions of child ability. With this in mind, more research is needed to determine whether, or under which circumstances, children with ADHD might demonstrate challenges in this area. It is possible, as suggested by Hutchins et al. (2016), that complex emotion recognition is preserved when executive demands are low (e.g., as in structured laboratory-type tasks) and impaired when executive demands are high (e.g., as when children endeavor to solve theory of mind problems in everyday life).
Recognition of ‘Guilt’ in DoHH
Although children who are DoHH are believed to have difficulty in the realm of complex emotion recognition, very few studies have examined their recognition of the complex emotions in general or recognition of guilt in particular. Preliminary analyses of data from a British sample of ~ 30 children ages 4 – 16 years of age with corrected hearing loss (Hutchins, in preparation), reveals deficits (low average – clinical range scores) in the recognition of guilt in approximately 65% of cases which appear to be related to more limited access to language in the prelinguistic and toddler years. With regard to the more complex emotions in general (e.g., guilt, pride, embarrassment), most researchers who have commented on the topic suggest that individuals who are DoHH experience difficulty not only recognizing the more complex emotions on the basis of their visual features but also in attributing these emotions to others and reasoning about their causes (Dyck et al., 2004; Rieffe, 2012).
For more information about emotion recognition in ASD, ADHD, and DoHH, see the description of the Emotion Recognition Subscale.
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