Heavy packs lead to lighter snacks (When feeling guilty).

Have you ever worried about something so much that it becomes a burden, and then felt like a weight has been lifted after hearing some good news? In every day speech, we use these types of linguistic metaphors to describe how we feel, by connecting emotional states to physical sensations. Have you ever felt the "heavy burden of guilt" after doing something you shouldn't have? In a recent paper from the Journal of experimental Psychology (Gino & Jami, 2013), researchers have proposed the idea that we actually embody physical sensations like weight when experiencing emotions like guilt.

In Gino and Jami’s paper, they asked some of their volunteers to carry a heavy back pack, and others to carry a light one. They then asked them to recall a time in the past when they've felt guilty about something, and to report how strong their feelings of guilt were. Surprisingly, they found that the participants carrying the heavy backpack self-reported stronger feelings of guilt than those carrying a light backpack.

Arguably self-reports are not a scientifically rigorous method of data collection. So, in follow up experiments, participants were given choices of healthy or non-healthy (supposedly guilt-inducing) snacks. When given a choice, the heavy backpack carriers tended to opt for the healthy option. It was as if the weight of the backpack was affecting how strongly they felt guilty for eating unhealthy snacks.

However carrying around heavy backpacks all day won’t make you eat any healthier – they only found the effect when participants wrote about an event in the past when they'd felt guilty. If they wrote about a neutral event, such as going to buy groceries, the weight of the backpack had no mediating effect on their behaviour.

So what does this mean? It supports an idea known as embodied cognition – which is that the way we process emotional information is closely tied to our senses and actions.

So in the context of this study, the participants recalling a guilty event were primed into the same bodily state that they experienced at the time of the event. Supposedly when they felt guilty, they also felt to some degree the sensation of carrying a weight. So providing them with an actual weight helped to facilitate and increase their feelings of guilt.

Based on their findings, the authors believe that heaviness may be an integral part of the human experience of feeling guilt, and the reasons for this may be due to our emotional development. When we first learn about abstract concepts like guilt, we need to tie it to something more concrete which we've already experienced earlier in our development, such as the physical experience of weight.

References

Kouchaki, M., Gino, F., & Jami, A. (2013, February 11). The Burden of Guilt: Heavy

Backpacks, Light Snacks, and Enhanced Morality. Journal of Experimental Psychology:

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