Underlying Personality Factors Behind Experiencing Shame, Guilt and Remorse

With increasing literature refuting the role of situational antecedents as reliably distinguishing the elicitation of shame, guilt and remorse, there arises a need to examine the underlying dispositional factors at play. Although personality factors like neuroticism and extraversion have often been analyzed along with positive–negative affect, other personality factors and their relation to the complex moral emotions have rarely been studied. A study was conducted on 147 participants to examine the role of big-five personality factors namely, neuroticism, extraversion, conscientiousness, openness to experience and agreeableness on the three complex moral emotions. Storyboards depicting 13 scenarios were used as stimuli for measuring shame, guilt and remorse. Results enumerate that while openness to experience has the ability to distinguish between guilt and shame, neuroticism and extraversion are significant positive predictors of guilt. Overall findings suggest the interplay of personality and moral emotions and highlights the need to study these emotions in larger and varied contexts.