The relation of guilt and other feelings to the diagnosis of depression

This paper reports a re‐evaluation of seven sets of findings appearing in the research literature. The findings were derived from questionnaire studies of feelings of guilt and other feelings in diagnosed depressives and other psychiatric groups. The publications did not provide sufficient information to evaluate important inconsistencies in the findings. However, an examination of the structure and content of the questionnaires which were used made it possible to account for the discrepancies. There were three main conclusions. The first was that the only way to minimize the ambiguity of questionnaire responses was to avoid the use of multiple‐item scales and only to use single‐item questions which were constructed as simply as possible. The second was that depressives were not much different from other people in the degree of outwardly and inwardly directed hostility. The third was that, while guilt feelings, with certain provisos, tended to be associated with the diagnosis of depression, other feelings appeared to be both more prominent in and more strongly associated with depression. These feelings consisted of increments in feelings of loss, in the most general sense of the word, and decrements in general positive pleasant feelings

Ambiguity · Depression (economics) · Developmental psychology · Feeling · Hostility · Relation (database) · Clinical Psychology · Emotions and Moral Behavior · Psychology · Social Psychology

• Experiences of strain and pleasure among British adults

  Open Access•Peter Warr, Roy Payne•Social Science & Medicine•1982

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