The Psychological Gain to Pain

Recent research tested if guilt causes individuals to need to punish themselves.
Analysis by June Tangney, a psychology professor at George Mason University, has examined the causes and consequences of guilt. Specifically, she finds that guilt occurs usually in response to a behavior the individual perceives as immoral.

Consequently, with guilt, the person doesn’t make evaluations of the whole self as poor or immoral, but judges a specific action as immoral. For example, somebody may feel guilty about stealing, but this wouldn’t mean, per se, that they would consider themselves a poor person, but instead, a fantastic individual who did a poor thing. (In contrast shame indicates that the individual is perceiving the self as wholly bad or flawed).

But how are these feelings related to self-punishment?
In past analysis, emotions of guilt happen to be linked to such issues as low self-esteem, cutting behavior, binge consuming and suicide. These correlational studies suggested a hyperlink between feelings of guilt and self-punishment.
Inside a recent experiment, Brock Bastian, a psychologist in the University of Queensland (Australia) and colleagues tested if creating individuals feel guilty increased their self-punishment. They’d half their participants come up with a time they felt poor for some thing they’d carried out, or a time they interacted with somebody. They then gave participants the opportunity to maintain their arm in cold water, and then measured their guilt.

This study found that individuals who wrote in regards to a time they did a problem kept their arm within the ice water longer, these people rated the encounter as more painful and these people, in turn, had low levels of guilt.
In other words, the expertise of punishing the self decreased people’s perceptions of guilt.