Toward an integrated clinical-developmental model of guilt

An integrated clinical-developmental model is proposed for understanding the development of guilt feelings from early childhood to adolescence. The central goal is to posit a new theoretical framework that expands existing social-cognitive models, social-domain models, and clinical approaches to the study of guilt (i.e., the Affect-Event Model [Arsenio, Gold, & Adams, 2006] and the Affect-Cognition Model [Malti & Keller, 2010]). Because guilt feelings are multifaceted and depend on both contextual variation (e.g., moral transgressions versus conventional issues) and dispositional guilt proneness, they can be associated with both adaptive and maladaptive outcomes for children and adolescents. The proposed model therefore suggests several clinical effects on adaptive, other-oriented behaviors and maladaptive, externalizing and internalizing symptoms across childhood and adolescence. The available evidence for each of these hypotheses is presented. The developmental model of guilt lays the groundwork for a more complete understanding of adaptive and maladaptive behaviors across development and provides new means for developing interventions that will reduce mental health problems and promote adaptive behaviors in children and adolescents. The model assumes that intervention efforts will be effective at producing behavioral change when (a) they are developmentally sensitive, rather than one-size-fits-all, and (b) they acknowledge that both extensively low and extensively high/inappropriate levels of guilt may be pathogenic and need to be targeted.