Guilty, free, and wise: Determinism and psychopathy diminish learning from negative emotions

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Abstract

Emotional experiences can bring about personal growth. For instance, feeling guilty may prompt one to learn from a mistake, and this learning can bring about different and better future behavior. Three studies found that belief in free will facilitated learning from emotional experiences, as inducing participants to disbelieve in free will was associated with reduced learning. Emotional responsiveness, as defined by low psychopathy scores, also facilitated learning from emotional experiences (Studies 2 and 3). The degree of learning associated with emotional experiences was measured by self-rating (Study 1), independent evaluations of lessons learned (Study 2), and whether participants joined a campus recycling program (after being made to feel guilty about an environmental transgression; Study 3).

Section snippets

Learning from emotional experiences

It is important to clarify what emotions are of interest to the present investigation because there is no unanimity of opinion in the literature regarding what constitutes feeling an emotion. The present investigation is concerned with conscious emotions. Conscious emotions are best defined in contrast to automatic affect, which is a relatively immediate and fleeting evaluation of something as good or bad, of which one may or may not be aware (Baumeister et al., 2007, Russell, 2003). Conscious

Belief in free will

Free will, as observed by Mele (2006), has no standard definition, but is generally understood to be the power or ability to perform free actions. There are several philosophical refinements on this basic definition (cf. Mele, 2009). The one that best fits the present work is the agent-causal libertarian theory of free will, a view that rejects determinism and regards agents (people) as the source of free actions in a way that is not completely reducible to their emotional or motivational

Emotional responsiveness

We expected that emotional experiences would promote learning (unless belief in free will was undermined), but this assumed one is responsive to emotions. Individual differences in emotional responsiveness can be viewed in two ways. The first is in the strength with which emotions are experienced, with emotionally responsive people feeling emotions more strongly than emotionally unresponsive people, who experience shallower emotions. One would expect people who experience emotions strongly to

Present investigation

The current work sought to identify the conditions under which people learn lessons from emotional experiences. Study 1 tested the hypothesis that a deterministic perspective impairs learning from emotions. Participants were assigned to conditions promoting free will or determinism, with others assigned to a neutral control condition. We predicted that the determinism condition would reduce what people learned from a guilt-inducing event relative to those in the free will condition or the

Study 1

Study 1 sought to establish whether deterministic thoughts would decrease learning from an emotional experience. We also measured the intensity of guilt, with the expectation that events which produced a low state of guilt would be less likely to provoke cognitive reflection than events causing substantial guilt. We predicted an interaction between guilt and experimental condition, such that the effects of experimental condition would primarily affect those reporting high levels of guilt.

Participants

Participants were 132 undergraduates (80 female) who participated in exchange for partial course credit. Racial demographics were as follows: 80% were White, 8% were Black, and the remainder was of other races or did not report race. Twelve percent reported Hispanic ethnicity.

Procedure

Participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a condition affirming belief in free will, a neutral condition, and a condition affirming determinism. Our free will manipulation followed that of Vohs and

Results

The effects of experimental condition and intensity of guilt on reported learning were assessed first by contrasting the determinism and the control condition. Using hierarchical linear regression, we entered guilt and experimental condition (determinism vs. control) in the first step. There was a simple effect for intensity of guilt, such that more guilt corresponded with more reported learning (β = .40, p < .001), and no effect for belief in free will, β = .02, p = .87. In the third step, we entered

Discussion

Participants who reported experiences causing them high levels of guilt reported learning more than people who reported low levels of guilt. This was expected, as bringing to mind a highly emotional experience is more likely to promote reflection on one's actions than an event causing little emotion. Yet the tendency for highly emotional events to prompt learning was dependent upon the belief that one acts freely: When belief in free will was undermined, reported learning from highly emotional

Study 2

Study 2 sought to build upon Study 1 in three ways. The first goal was to move beyond guilt. Guilt, along with shame, embarrassment, and pride, are self-conscious emotions, which is to say that they are self-focused emotions that generally result from a perceived social evaluation (Tangney & Fischer, 1995). Guilt is also a negative emotion, unlike joy or pride, for instance. Our first goal was to uncover whether the effects of determinism are stronger for negative emotions or self-conscious

Participants

Participants were 195 (157 females) undergraduates who participated in exchange for partial course credit. Seventy-four percent reported their race as White, 15% were Black, and the remainder was of other races or did not report race. Ten percent reported Hispanic ethnicity.

Procedure

Participants completed questionnaires and other stimulus materials via computer. They completed a self-report measure of primary psychopathy (Levenson, Kiehl, & Fitzpatrick, 1995), which has been validated (Lynman,

Belief in free will

Manipulation of belief in free will was successful, as participants were more likely to report having deterministic beliefs in the determinism condition (M = 4.11, SD = 3.41) than in the neutral condition, M = 3.41, SD = 2.42, F(1,193) = 3.88, p = .05.

Type of emotion

A naïve research assistant read the description of each event and coded it according to whether it was likely to cause guilt, fear, and pride. All three emotions were coded dichotomously for all participants. As expected, events independently perceived as

Discussion

Study 1 found that participants induced to believe deterministic views were less likely to report learning from a guilt-inducing experience than those affirming belief in free will. Study 1 also indicated that the effect of belief in free will depended upon the intensity of an emotional experience, such that disbelief in free will undercut perceptions of learning at high levels of emotion. Study 2 indicated that the effects of determinism went beyond self-ratings; deterministic beliefs were

Study 3

One shortcoming of the previous two studies was that participants self-nominated an emotion-causing event, and differences in psychopathy may have influenced the extent to which that event had been the subject of reflection prior to the experiment. Study 3 provided participants with a novel guilt induction that would not have been the subject of any prior reflection. Our expectation was that introducing a novel emotional experience would make the determinism condition effective in reducing

Participants

Participants were 138 undergraduates (all female) who participated in exchange for partial course credit. Seventy-six percent were White, 8% were Black, and the remainder was of other races or did not choose to specify race. Twenty-two percent reported Hispanic ethnicity.

Procedure

Participants first gave informed consent, and then completed a self-report measure of primary (α = .81) and secondary psychopathy (α = .78; Levenson et al., 1995). Next, participants were randomly assigned to either the determinism

Manipulation check

Deterministic beliefs were higher in the determinism condition (M = 3.64, SD = 2.15) than in the control condition, M = 2.54, SD = 1.96, t(82) = 2.43, p = .017.

Volunteering

We began by dichotomizing primary psychopathy into those scoring high (1 SD above the mean) and those scoring low (1 SD below the mean), as in Study 2 (see also Mahmut et al., 2007). We observed a significant effect for both determinism condition (β = .39, p = .02) and primary psychopathy (β = -.39, p = .02) such that the determinism condition and high

Discussion

Deterministic beliefs were again associated with learning relatively little from an emotional event. One important change in the current study is that we moved beyond self-reports of learning. Instead, we measured whether participants, after reading about the high environmental costs of inadequate recycling, would volunteer their time to benefit a local recycling program—presumably to avert guilt related to inadequate recycling. As expected, deterministic beliefs caused a decrease in

General discussion

In three studies, we found that deterministic views caused a decrease in learning from emotional experiences. We also identified the circumstances under which disbelief in free will caused this decrease. Events that produced high levels of emotionality were more impacted by free will beliefs than low-emotionality events, as observed in Studies 1 and 2. This may have been due to a floor effect, because mundane and unemotional events were relatively less likely to evoke any kind of serious

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