A new line of research investigates if the emotional experience of guilt can translate to a subjective feeling of weight. 
 
 That is, when a person says that they are “carrying guilt” or “weighed down by guilt,” are these just expressions, or is there something more to these metaphors? 
 
 Princeton researcher Martin Day, Ph.D., and Ramona Bobocel, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo, recently published the results of a series of studies that begin to offer answers to that question. 
 
 In an article titled “The Weight of a Guilty Conscience: Subjective Body Weight as an Embodiment of Guilt” in the journal PLOS ONE, Day and Bobocel find evidence that the emotional experience of guilt can be grounded in subjective bodily sensation. 
 
 The researchers believe their findings shed light on broader understanding of how humans perceive guilt: 
 
 “Embodied cognition is an emerging field in psychology that examines how our thoughts and emotions interact with our bodies to guide behavior. Guilt is important because it plays a role in regulating our moral behavior. It can help us correct our mistakes and prevent future wrongdoing. 
 
 “People know that guilt feels unpleasant and is sometimes associated with feelings of tension and regret. However, we know less about the broad nature of guilt — such as how it interacts with the body and our beliefs about the body.” 
 
 The researchers examined whether guilt is actually embodied as a sensation of weight by using a series of studies which asked students and members of the public to recall a time that they did something unethical. 
 
 People recalled a variety of wrongdoings, such as lying, stealing or cheating. Afterward, in a separate task, investigators asked them to rate their subjective feeling of their own body weight as compared to their average. That is, did they feel less weight than usual, about the same weight, or more weight? 
 
 The perceptions were then compared to participants in control conditions who recalled an ethical memory, a memory of someone else’s unethical actions or who were not asked to recall a memory. 
 
 “From an embodied cognition framework, we predicted that recalling personal unethical acts would imbue feelings of guilt that would be embodied as greater sensations of weight,” the researchers said. 
 
 In practice, the researchers found that recalling personal unethical acts led participants to report increased subjective body weight as compared to recalling ethical acts, unethical acts of others or no recall. 
 
 The investigators also found that this increased sense of weight was related to participants’ heightened feelings of guilt, and not other negative emotions, such as sadness or disgust. 
 
 Although people sometimes associate importance with “heaviness,” they found no evidence that importance could explain this finding. For example, ethical deeds were rated just as important as unethical actions, but only unethical, guilt-inducing memories led to increased reports of weight. 
 
 In a final study, investigators explored a perceptual consequence of the weight of guilt. Using the same materials, participants were tested as to whether recall of unethical memories would affect perceived effort to complete a variety of helping behaviors as compared to a control condition. 
 
 “Importantly, some of these behaviors involved physical effort, such as carrying groceries upstairs for someone, whereas other behaviors did not, such as giving someone spare change. We found no differences between conditions for the perceived effort of the nonphysical actions,” the researchers said. 
 
 However, those who recalled unethical memories, which can be accompanied by sensations of weight, perceived the physical behaviors to involve even greater effort to complete compared to ratings provided by those in a control condition. 
 
 Researchers admit that while it was exciting to find these patterns of results — which are consistent with an embodied theory of emotion — this research field is still relatively new research. 
 
 Further, recent and complementary findings on this topic from independent research labs suggest that simulating the experience of the weight of guilt, such as with a heavy backpack, seems to be tied to regulating moral behavior. 
 
 “Such results are encouraging, and hopefully this emerging line of research will lead us to a more comprehensive understanding of the nature of guilt,” Day and Bobocel said. 
 
 Source: Princeton University ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period. ||||| Abstract Guilt is an important social and moral emotion. In addition to feeling unpleasant, guilt is metaphorically described as a “weight on one's conscience.” Evidence from the field of embodied cognition suggests that abstract metaphors may be grounded in bodily experiences, but no prior research has examined the embodiment of guilt. Across four studies we examine whether i) unethical acts increase subjective experiences of weight, ii) feelings of guilt explain this effect, and iii) whether there are consequences of the weight of guilt. Studies 1–3 demonstrated that unethical acts led to more subjective body weight compared to control conditions. Studies 2 and 3 indicated that heightened feelings of guilt mediated the effect, whereas other negative emotions did not. Study 4 demonstrated a perceptual consequence. Specifically, an induction of guilt affected the perceived effort necessary to complete tasks that were physical in nature, compared to minimally physical tasks. 
 
 Citation: Day MV, Bobocel DR (2013) The Weight of a Guilty Conscience: Subjective Body Weight as an Embodiment of Guilt. PLoS ONE 8(7): e69546. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0069546 Editor: Manos Tsakiris, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom Received: December 16, 2012; Accepted: June 13, 2013; Published: July 31, 2013 Copyright: © 2013 Day, Bobocel. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: This research was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant to D. Ramona Bobocel. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. 
 
 Introduction In everyday language, guilt is treated as a tangible substance—people bring guilt upon themselves, carry it, or are weighed down by it. Similarly, feelings of guilt can be expressed as a “weight on one's conscience.” Such metaphoric language suggests that guilt has properties similar to an object with real weight [1]. On the one hand, weight-related adjectives may merely represent traditional descriptions of guilt. On the other hand, guilt is a real emotion, and the heaviness of guilt may be embodied as a feeling of weight. In this paper, we tested whether the experience of guilt is grounded in sensations of increased weight. Guilt is a negative emotion that involves an awareness of responsibility for an event [2], [3]. In particular, guilt arises from a focus on a specific action, or non-action, that violates societal or personal standards [4], [5], [6]. One reason that guilt is important is because of its role in moral and social functioning [7], [8]. The anticipation of feeling guilty in the future may help prevent individuals from participating in immoral acts that violate internalized standards [9], [10]. For example, those with a stronger tendency to feel guilty are less likely to lie or act dishonestly [10], [11]. Feeling guilt following a wrongdoing can also be socially adaptive. For instance, guilt is commonly linked with reparative behaviors, such as taking responsibility, apologizing, and putting in additional effort with others [7], [11], [12]. Individuals tend to have a remarkable capacity to feel guilty. Guilt can be evoked by doing something “bad” interpersonally [4], or for private misdeeds [13], [14]. People can experience anticipated guilt for the responsibility of future actions [15], vicarious guilt for the wrongdoing of close others [16], and collective guilt for harms committed by one's ingroup [17]. In phenomenological reports, guilt is characterized not only as feeling badly, but also by feelings of tension and regret [10]. However, to our knowledge there has been no empirical examination of the subjective weight induced by guilt. Although guilt and weight are seemingly unrelated, there is mounting evidence that cognitions are grounded in sensations and actions of the body [18], [19], [20]. For instance, holding a warm coffee cup led a target person to be rated as more interpersonally warm [21], and squeezing a soft (i.e., tender) ball led sex-ambiguous faces to be more often categorized as female [22]. In addition, recalling personal experiences of social exclusion increased reports of feeling cold [23], and reminders of immoral (i.e., dirty) acts bolstered motivations to cleanse [24], [25]. The “weight of guilt” metaphor may also reveal core links between emotional reaction to wrongdoing and sensations of weight consistent with an embodied theory of emotion [26]. Under this approach, embodiment can facilitate affective experience. The reverse pattern can also occur: emotional experience, through novel activation or recall, can facilitate embodiment [27]. Given the important role of guilt in personal and social functioning, we sought to broaden our understanding of guilt by examining embodiment. We conducted four studies of the embodied nature of guilt. In Studies 1–3 we examine the effect of unethical acts on subjective body weight. As unethical acts can lead to feelings of guilt for violating internalized standards, in Studies 2 and 3 we also test whether guilt can account for any increase in subjective weight. As we explain in greater detail after Study 3, we then examine a possible consequence of this phenomenon (Study 4). Our guiding hypothesis in Studies 1–3 was that immoral acts, which can imbue guilt, would also lead to feelings of additional weight on the body compared to control conditions. 
 
 Study 1 Method Participants. One hundred and fifty three Canadian undergraduates (60.1% women, 0.7% undisclosed; M age = 20.75, SD = 4.41) participated in exchange for course credit. Ethnic groups included 39.2% White, 28.7% Asian, 14.4% East Indian, 4.6% Middle Eastern, 1.3% Black, 0.7% Hispanic, 0.7% Aboriginal, 9.1% Other and 1.3% undisclosed. This study and the remaining studies were approved by the ethics committee of the University of Waterloo, and all participants indicated written consent. Procedure. Participants were informed that they would complete two tasks to help develop materials for future research: one task concerned the description of memories and a separate task involved perceptual judgment. First, participants were randomly assigned to experimental condition. Two thirds were assigned to one of two memory conditions, whereas the remaining third was assigned to a no-memory, control condition. Next, participants in the memory conditions were asked to recall and describe in detail a time they either did something ethical or unethical, similar to past research [25]. The unethical memory condition can induce strong feelings of guilt as participants focus on a wrongful behavior from their past. Following the manipulation, participants made a perceptual judgment, which was our measure of subjective weight. They were told that sometimes people feel more or less weight, and “Compared to your average weight, how much do you feel you weigh right now?” (1 = much less than my average, 6 = exactly my average, 11 = much more than my average). Participants in the control condition received the same cover story, but completed the perception task first, and were debriefed before completing the memory task. Participants' physical weight in pounds was reported in an unrelated testing session prior to study registration. Results and Discussion As predicted, a significant one-way ANOVA indicated that subjective weight varied by condition, F(2, 150) = 4.33, p = .02. As seen in Figure 1, contrasts revealed that compared to their average weight, participants in the unethical condition reported weighing significantly more (M = 7.47, SD = 1.63) than those in the ethical condition (M = 6.57, SD = 1.63), t(98) = 2.76, p = .007, and also more than control participants (M = 6.79, SD = 1.54), t(102) = 2.18, p = .03. There were no differences in subjective weight between the ethical and control conditions, t(100) = 0.70, p = .48. Moreover, participants' physical weight did not vary by condition, F<1, ns, and controlling for this factor did not affect the significance of the results. PPT PowerPoint slide 
 
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 larger image ( ) TIFF original image ( ) Download: Figure 1. Mean ratings of subjective weight following recall of ethical or unethical events, or no recall. Study 1. Error bars indicate standard errors. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0069546.g001 Thus, when participants recalled an unethical memory, they reported higher than average subjective body weight compared to participants who recalled an ethical memory or did not recall a memory. Notably, these findings remained strong regardless of participants' physical weight. As people sometimes mention feeling lighter or elevated after performing good deeds, this figurative language might lead one to predict that ethical acts could lighten one's perception of weight. However, we found that thinking of such actions did not assuage the typical sensation of body weight compared to a neutral condition. Study 1 provides the first evidence that violations of ethical standards may be embodied as sensations of body weight. We believe that feelings of guilt may be one factor that drives the effect. Thus, we conducted Studies 2 and 3 to replicate the results of Study 1 and examine whether feelings of guilt can explain the findings. We also sought to rule out other explanations. In Study 2 we examine whether increases in weight perceptions are the result of exposure to personal unethical acts or unethical acts in general. It is conceivable that thinking about any negative and immoral deed may “weigh on one's conscience,” and affect weight sensations. Alternatively, if guilt is related to perceptions of weight, then unethical actions irrelevant to the self should not induce greater perceptions of weight. To learn more about the characteristics and impact of the memories recalled, we also assessed common moral emotions (i.e., disgust, pride) and relevant factors of the events recalled (e.g., responsibility). In Study 2 we again hypothesized that unethical acts will lead to perceptions of greater weight than control conditions. Moreover, unethical acts should induce feelings of guilt, which will explain reports of subjective weight. 
 
 Study 4 Method Participants. Sixty seven U.S. participants (46.3% women; M age = 28.48, SD = 9.93) were recruited for an online study as in Studies 2 and 3. Ethnic groups included 68.7% White, 9.0% Asian, 7.4% Black, 7.4% Hispanic, 1.5% Middle Eastern, 1.5% Native American, and 4.5% Other. Procedure. Participants were randomly assigned to recall either an unethical or ethical memory, as in Study 3. Afterwards, participants made perceptual judgments. To assess the perceived effort of behaviors, participants were presented with a variety of tasks and indicated how much energy and effort each task would require (1 = Not at all, 9 = Very much effort and energy), similar to past research [34]. Consistent with the tendency for guilt to be associated with reparative actions [10], [12], we framed the items as prosocial behaviors. Three questions involved physical effort (carrying groceries upstairs for someone, helping someone move, carrying a basket of laundry for someone, α = .75), and three questions involved minimal physical effort (giving someone change, holding an elevator for someone, donating online, α = .71). Results and Discussion We conducted a 2 (Unethical vs. Ethical)×2 (Physical vs. Nonphysical) mixed ANOVA on perceived task effort, with repeated measures on the last variable. Not surprisingly given the manipulation, there was a strong within-subjects effect of physical tasks, F(1, 65) = 160.22, p<.001. This finding can be interpreted as a manipulation check on the physical effort items, where physical tasks were perceived to involve more effort and energy (M = 4.53, SD = 1.54) than the nonphysical tasks (M = 2.37, SD = 1.47). There was no main effect of the morality of recall, F<1, ns. Importantly, the predicted interaction was significant, F(1, 65) = 9.26, p = .003. As seen in Figure 3, the physical tasks were perceived as more effortful by those who had just recalled an unethical, weight-of-guilt inducing memory (M = 4.98, SD = 1.54) than participants who had recalled an ethical memory (M = 4.21, SD = 1.48), F(1, 65) = 4.18, p = .04. For nonphysical tasks, there was no significant difference between the unethical (M = 2.18, SD = 1.35) and ethical conditions (M = 2.50, SD = 1.56), F<1, ns. In other words, the same manipulation that instilled perceptions of weight related to guilt in our earlier studies was also found to affect judgments of effort for completing physical, but not nonphysical tasks. We believe this pattern of results occurred because the weight of guilt made the physical tasks appear as more effortful to complete. Whereas Studies 1–3 established that induced guilt predicted subjective body weight, Study 4 builds upon these findings by demonstrating a consequence consistent with increased weight. PPT PowerPoint slide 
 
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 larger image ( ) TIFF original image ( ) Download: Figure 3. Mean perceived effort of physical and nonphysical tasks following recall of ethical or unethical events. Study 4. Error bars indicate standard errors. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0069546.g003 We recognize that the weight of guilt is not the only mechanism that may alter physical effort perceptions. For instance, having more frequent and bothersome thoughts surrounding a kept secret is correlated with effort perceptions [34]. Nevertheless, the present study demonstrates an effect that is most consistent with the embodiment of the affective experience of guilt, and is consistent with the results of Studies 1–3. 
 
 General Discussion Guilt is a common emotional experience following an unethical deed. Four studies revealed how actions that imbue feelings of guilt may be embodied and can affect judgments. Extending the metaphor that guilt is a heavy weight on people's conscience, Studies 1–3 demonstrated that immoral acts led to reports of increased subjective body weight compared to control conditions. Study 1 isolated the direction of the effect: unethical acts made participants feel heavier, but ethical acts did not make participants feel lighter. Studies 2 and 3 found that increased feelings of guilt can explain greater subjective weight, rather than feelings of disgust, pride, or sadness. Finally, Study 4 demonstrated that the same manipulation affected judgments consistent with the effects of physical weight. Physically demanding behaviors were perceived as more effortful to complete following recall of unethical as compared to ethical acts, thus indicating a consequence of the weight of guilt phenomenon. Our examination of guilt contributes to the understanding of this important moral emotion and supports an embodied emotion perspective [26]. In particular, these findings demonstrate that the emotional experience of guilt can be grounded in subjective bodily sensation. In this first demonstration, we focused on the role of guilt and its effects, rather than the bidirectionality of the weight of guilt. Future research could explore whether the simulation of guilt (e.g., through physical means) may facilitate affective experience and understanding of emotion-related content [27]. Another possibility would be to test the boundaries of the weight of guilt, such as by determining whether this embodied metaphor has effects in unrelated domains [19]. Beyond confirming our hypotheses and supporting related theory, there are concerns and limitations related to our investigation as well as potential future research directions. One concern raised in the review process was the possibility that increases in reported subjective weight were due to some participants recently eating, and thus gaining weight, prior to study participation. However, such a possibility cannot readily explain the pattern of subjective weight results observed given that participants were randomly assigned to one of the two (or three) study conditions, in all studies. Another concern raised was whether participants reported more subjective weight because they associated unethical acts with subjective weight, and believed that indicating more weight was the “correct” answer. To help reduce the possibility of such demand characteristics, in all our studies we disguised the true study purpose by employing a cover story that conceptually separated our manipulation from our measures. Moreover, in Study 2, we asked participants to recall either unethical acts of their own, or of distant others, and found that only personal unethical acts led to increased weight. This suggests that it was not the category of unethical acts in general that led to reports of increased subjective weight. Rather, our tests of mediation imply that feelings of guilt played a role. We acknowledge that it is difficult to completely rule out the possibility that participants associated the concept of guilt with weight once they experienced guilt. In part, this is because we believe that guilt is responsible for the increased sensation of subjective weight. We did, however, strive to reduce the likelihood that participants would make a direct association between guilt and weight by requesting them to recall unethical acts instead of acts for which they feel guilty, which may have been more likely to prime the concept of guilt. Future research could examine if the semantic prime of guilt does or does not have a mediating role in the association between guilt and increased subjective weight. It may also be of interest to pinpoint mediating processes between the manipulation of unethical acts and feelings of guilt. For example, future research could examine whether body postures have a role [35], [36]. Although this research was centered on the role of guilt and the weight of guilt metaphor, it is important to consider other emotions. We tested disgust, pride, and sadness, but did not find evidence that these emotions could explain reports of additional weight in our studies. These findings are encouraging, but additional research that manipulates the experience of other emotions would help to confirm or disconfirm their association with increased weight. Still, if such associations were found, it would be important to examine whether there are overlapping mechanisms at play. For example, guilt is sometimes associated with shame. As in the present research, guilt can be evoked by focusing on actions that do not meet internalized standards (e.g., “I engaged in an unethical behavior”), whereas shame tends to be evoked by broad negative self-evaluations (e.g., “I am a terrible person”) [5], [10]. Guilt and shame are distinct emotions, but individuals sometimes confuse them. This presents problems for measuring them simultaneously in research [32], which was one reason why shame was not assessed in the present studies. In addition to difficulties in measurement, we did not suppose shame to be primarily responsible for any increased weight. Shame has been more commonly associated with feeling physically small, or a desire to hide the self [10]. Thus we suspect that the embodiment of shame may be more related to physically making the body small (e.g., by crouching). This prediction would need to be confirmed in future research. One potential limitation of the present research is that only situational guilt was examined, but it is possible that weight related to guilt may also vary depending on individuals' propensity to experience guilt [10], [11]. Although we did vary our manipulation somewhat across studies, other variations could manipulate vicarious [16], or collective guilt [17], or examine whether the anticipation of future guilt shows similar, weaker, or stronger effects [37], [38]. Finally, in Study 4 we examined how the weight of guilt affected perceptions of effort to complete physical acts. One interpretation of this result is that the weight of guilt could function to slow individuals' exertion of physical effort, which in turn provides the opportunity for contemplation about how to repair the relevant violation. Future research could shed light on this possibility. In conclusion, the present research revealed that personal experiences of immorality can be partly understood by sensations of weight, and that guilt appears to have some responsibility for this effect. Although guilt is literally weightless, we demonstrate that the embodiment of guilt can have consequences as if it does indeed have weight. As this was our initial investigation on this topic we hesitate to draw broad or strong conclusions based exclusively on these findings. Replications using other methodologies and examinations of complementary embodied processes related to guilt may reinforce our results. Generally, we believe that further research on this topic may lead to a broadened understanding of the nature of guilt and related downstream effects. 
 
 Acknowledgments We would like to thank Michael Ross, Richard Eibach, Steven Spencer, Joanne Wood, and Randi Garcia, for their thoughtful comments and suggestions for this line of research. Portions of this research were presented at the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (San Antonio, Texas; January, 2011).
– A new study suggests that the phrase "weight of a guilty conscience" has an element of truth to it. Researchers found that people asked to recall their own unethical behavior felt physically heavier when asked to assess their own body weight, reports PsychCentral. (Researchers compared them to people in a control group asked to recall ethical behavior.) The guilt-wracked participants also felt so loagy that the idea of expending a little physical effort to help someone—carrying groceries up stairs, for instance—seemed far more taxing to them than to the non-guilty subjects. "Overall, it was exciting to find these patterns of results, which are consistent with an embodied theory of emotion," say the authors of the study in Plos ONE. "However, this is still relatively new research, and we are still exploring how to more fully characterize the experience of guilt." Of course, not all types of unethical behavior lead to a guilty conscience. A separate study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that cheaters often experience something like a "high" after cheating. But, as the New York Times points out, that "high" is higher if the cheaters don't think they hurt anyone. (On a different note, click to read about how moms are more tired than dads.)