Guilt and early traumatic experiences: An investigation of empathy-based guilt in adult survivors of early parental death

This quantitative study focused on factors influencing those who lost a parent before the age of 20. The study explored the role of empathy-based guilt, specifically survivor guilt and omnipotent responsibility guilt, depression, well-being, the surviving parent's care of the child, the child's participation in mourning behaviors, and individual personality traits of neuroticism and introversion in 137 adults who lost a parent during the first 20 years of life. The participants filled out an online survey that included the Interpersonal Guilt Questionnaire (IGQ-67), the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI), the Mourning Behavior Checklist (MBC), the Big Five Inventory (BFI-44), and the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS).;The study found that both survivor guilt and omnipotent responsibility guilt showed significant positive correlations with neuroticism and depression, and a negative correlation with subjective well-being. Significant positive relationships were found for survivor guilt and omnipotent responsibility guilt with depression in the surviving parent post-death In addition, survivor guilt was significantly and negatively correlated with the surviving parent's level of care and higher extraversion. Contrary to the primary hypothesis, omnipotent responsibility guilt was positively related to factors that are normally considered positive and adaptive, such as participation in mourning behaviors, high satisfaction with childhood pre-death, and living in an intact family before death.;Also in contrast to the findings from the literature, in this study neither level of parental care post death nor involvement in mourning activities was a significant predictor of current depressive symptoms, as measured by PHQ-9. Instead, survivor guilt and neuroticism were the most significant predictors of current symptoms of depression in this population. However, when depression was measured by the number of lifetime depressive episodes, both survivor guilt and level of parental care were found to be equally powerful predictors of depression.;Exploratory analyses tested for the effect of confounding variables, including socioeconomic status, age, gender, ethnicity, age at death, pre-death satisfaction with childhood, childhood and adulthood traumatic events, and post- death support. Implications of these findings were discussed as well as suggestions for future research in this area.