The Measurement of Collective Guilt: What It Is and What It Is Not

Abstract

Emotions can be ephemeral. How events are appraised and the subjective experience they generate can rapidly shift with changes in the social context. In order to capture people's emotional responses to events, psychologists have employed a variety of methods including the assessment of facial expressions (Ekman, 1984), physiological reactivity (Pennebaker, 1982) and, most commonly, self-report methods (Shaver et al., 1987). Particularly for the self-conscious emotions of pride, shame, and guilt, for which differential physiological symptoms are not expected, researchers have primarily relied on various participant self-assessments (Tangney & Fischer, 1995). Individual differences in the tendency to experience these emotions are generally assessed via self-ratings of the frequency, duration, or intensity with which they are felt. Indices that capture agreement or disagreement with Likert-type statements concerning how much the emotion is experienced with respect to a particular referent are also often employed. In this chapter, we report on the construction and validation of a self-report scale to assess various aspects of the collective guilt experience.