An Empirical Study On The Relationship Of Counterfactual Thinking And Guilt And Shame

Counterfactual thinking is a supposed thinking activity that an individual psychologically negates and reconstructs some past events that happened before. As a human conscious activity, its thinking process is affected by non-cognitive factors such as individual emotion, motives and attitudes, etc. In turn, it can have a strong anti-effect on these non-cognitive factors. Among them, Guilt and Shame are less noticed but they have important value in self-moral conscious sentiment. More and more researches have found that there are great differences in many aspects between them. This study attempts to test a "self and behavior" hypothesis of the differences between Guilt and Shame by using both of self-report method and situational simulated method. From the perspective of counterfactual thinking, it systematically approaches the features that the subjects of college students and juvenile criminals have in the relationship of the counterfactual thinking and Guilt and Shame, and it also tries to study the consistency of the counterfactual thinking and Guilt and Shame by using various research methods in order to enrich the theories of the relationship between of counterfactual thinking and Guilt and Shame, and improve the practical activities in remolding criminal's behavior by stimulating self- moral sense of juvenile criminals.This study consists of one preparatory study and two series studies. The preparatory study mainly collects the cases of two kinds of subjects on Guilt and Shame to make preparation for the following formal studies. The formal studies include two methods, one is self-report method, the other is situational simulated method. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between counterfactual thinking and Guilt and Shame, that is, the two sub-studies select typical cases and non-typical ones and explore the relationship of counterfactual thinking and Guilt and shame. The results are as follows:1) The result of this study does not support the "self and behavior" hypothesis of the differences between Guilt and Shame advanced by western scholars and even opposes their study results. This study results show that Self is related to Guilt, and Sham is related to individual Behaviors. 2) The relationship of counterfactual thinking and Guilt and Shame between college students and juvenile criminals has consistency as well as differences in some aspects. As for college students, their self-oriented counterfactual thinking are more related to Guilt than that of juvenile criminals; as for juvenile criminals, their behavior-oriented counterfactual thinking are more related to Shame than that of juvenile criminals.3) The two methods, self-report method and situational simulated method, have similar results and show consistency to a great degree in the relationship of the counterfactual thinking and Guilt and Shame. However more attention should be paid to the validity of the research design.