Assessing guilt in children: A rose by any other name still has thorns

Publisher Summary Many young children face conflicts between their egoistic desires and moral motives. When the egoistic motive wins out, children pay the price with a kind of “moral” guilt, even though people also feel guilty without consciously entertaining a moral conflict. Thus, a child or adult can feel guilty for interpersonal reasons that result from a combination of empathy and the knowledge that the perpetrator caused distress to the victim. Most measures of guilt and shame in children are variations of instruments developed for adults. To appreciate the instruments for children, it is therefore useful to consider several of the available measures for adults. Three instruments are the most promising measures of adults' proneness to guilt and/or shame. These are the Test of Self-Conscious Affect (TOSCA), the Personal Feelings Questionnaire-2 (PFQ-2), and the Guilt Inventory (GI). The TOSCA is a scenario-based measure in which participants rate on a series of 5-point scales their likelihood of responding to 15 situations in ways that have been precoded to reflect guilt, shame, and other responses. The measure operationalizes guilt proneness as a cross-situationally consistent tendency to express high degrees of regret, remorse, apology, and reparation, whereas it operationalizes shame proneness as a consistently strong inclination to criticize the self or withdraw across situations. The PFQ-2 is a 16-item checklist in which respondents rate their feelings, precoded for guilt or shame, on a 4-point scale to reflect how often they experience each feeling and the GI consists of 45 statements which participants rate on a 5-point scale.