Guilt in Childhood: Intersections with Regulatory Functioning and Implications for Aggression

We know that guilt plays an important role in managing social behavior across development, particularly in reducing the likelihood of aggression against others. However, this is to a large extent where developmental research on the adaptive nature of guilt stands, as few studies have ventured deeper into the underlying mechanisms of guilt and beyond its direct corresponding action tendencies. This dissertation aimed to address these overarching gaps and thereby achieve deeper theoretical and clinical understandings of guilt in childhood. Study 1 considered the current state of the literature as an endpoint and asked: How does children’s guilt emerge in the first place? It investigated the regulatory building blocks of guilt responses in real time and found that changes in physiology leading up to and during transgressions were uniquely associated with the intensity of children’s guilt following such transgressions. Next, the existing literature was considered a starting point from which the aggression-reducing properties of guilt were examined beyond mere direct effects. Studies 2 and 3 tested whether high guilt offset the aggravating links between underarousal and overarousal, respectively, and aggression at different points in childhood. Study 2 found that lower resting heart rate was significantly associated with higher physical aggression for children who reported low—but not medium and high—levels of guilt. Study 3 found that within-child spikes in daily anger that were higher than such children’s typical anger levels were significantly associated with higher aggression, but less so for those with high levels of guilt. In sum, this dissertation focused on the intersections of guilt and regulatory functioning to understand the underlying mechanisms of guilt and its links to aggressive behavior in childhood. In doing so, it significantly contributed to our knowledge of the momentary formation of children’s guilt and its multifaceted role in mitigating aggression in the face of regulatory deficits.

Department dc:contributor.department

Psychology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Colasante, Tyler

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Malti, Tina

• aggression
• childhood
• development
• emotion regulation
• guilt
• psychophysiology

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/80855

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/80855