In this paper we argue in favor of the existence of two different guilt feelings: altruistic guilt (AG) and deontological guilt (DG). AG arises from having harmed, through one's own action or omission, an innocent victim, while DG arises from the transgression of an internalized norm. In most daily experiences of guilt feelings both types are present, but we argue that they are not traceable to each other and that each can be present without the other. We show that the two guilt feelings can be distinguished with reference to behavioral, cognitive, and neurophysiological aspects. Moreover, we demonstrate that they are differently related to other processes and emotions. AG is connected with pain, empathy and ToM. DG is strongly related to disgust. We briefly illustrate some implications for moral psychology and clinical psychology.

One of the several ways in which affect may influence cognition is when people use affect as a source of information about external events. Emotional reasoning, ex-consequentia reasoning, and affect-as-information are terms referring to the mechanism that can lead people to take their emotions as information about the external world, even when the emotion is not generated by the situation to be evaluated. Pre-existing emotions may thus bias evaluative judgments of unrelated events or topics. From this perspective, the more people experience a particular kind of affect, the more they may rely on it as a source of valid information. Indeed, in several studies, it was found that adult patients suffering from psychological disorders tend to use negative affect to estimate the negative event as more severe and more likely and to negatively evaluate preventive performance. The findings on this topic have contributed to the debate that theorizes the use of emotional reasoning as responsible for the maintenance of dysfunctional beliefs and the pathological disorders based on these beliefs. The purpose of this paper is to explore this topic by reviewing and discussing the main studies in this area, leading to a deeper understanding of this phenomenon.

This paper examines the impact of moral emotions, such as guilt, on decisions under risk. In two experiments, we demonstrated that guilt emotion influences preferences for risky and riskless choices, depending on the subject’s moral goal, i.e., reparation or expiation, whereas anger consistently elicits a preference for taking risks. Unlike other moral emotions (e.g., anger), guilt is thus not characterized by a fixed preference for either risky or riskless choices. Preferences vary as a function of the option that may satisfy the moral goal, instead of by a form of bias that the different emotions play toward decisions under risk. Finally, in both experiments, responses appear to be based on the framing of the decision problem according to the induced emotional state (guilt or anger), rather than on the descriptions of the outcomes as given in the options (gain-loss framing effect).