Effects of Deontological and Altruistic Guilt on Empathy

Guilt as an important self-conscious emotion plays both constructive and destructive roles in affective and cognitive processes of empathy during social interactions. To reconcile these contrasting perspectives, we explored how two distinct guilt emotions-deontological guilt (DG) and altruistic guilt (AG)-affect affective and cognitive empathy, based on a dualistic thesis of guilt. We employed auditory stories to induce participants' DG, AG and neutral emotional states and used an empathy task adapted from the Multifaceted Empathy Test (MET) to measure two types of empathy. Results showed that the DG group demonstrated greater affective empathy towards angry, disgusted, fearful and sad faces, and the AG group exhibited more affective empathy towards fearful and sad facial expressions compared to those in the neutral group. Moreover, the DG group also experienced more affective empathy towards disgusted and fearful faces than the AG group. However, cognitive empathy for facial expressions did not differ among the three emotional state groups. Overall, these findings suggest that DG and AG emotions both have a constructive effect on affective empathic responses for specific emotions.