DEMANDA CUANTITATIVA

The association between guilt and depression has been long acknowledged in psychology.

Indeed, a feeling of guilt is a criterion for major depressive disorder in the DSM5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). However, not much has yet been said about the connection between guilt and empathy. In psychoanalytic theory, guilt is viewed as a manifestation of unconscious hostility and rivalry, which begins with the child's desire to kill her/his same-sex parent in the oedipal struggle (O'Connor et al., 2007). The Freudian idea, so widespread in the middle to late twentieth century, is being gradually replaced by more recent concepts. Current research refers to guilt as a prosocial emotion tied to empathy and to the desire to maintain social bonds (Cunningham et al., 1980; Tangney, 1992; Miceli, 1992; Baumeister et al., 1994;

Baumeister and Leary, 1995; Jones et al., 1995; O’Connor, 2000). For example, Baumeister and Leary (1995) argue that the need to maintain social bonds (the need to which the authors refer to as ‘belongingness’) is actually the most fundamental human desire; unfulfilled, it leads to a number of negative emotions with guilt as one of the most prominent. Empirical studies of how people induce guilt in others have found that such inductions are most frequently confined to close interpersonal relationships. A major reason for inducing guilt is to cause one's partner to exert himself or herself more to maintain the interpersonal relationship (Vangelisti et al., 1991; Baumeister et al., 1994). Many episodes of guilt can thus be understood as responses to disturbances or threats to interpersonal attachments. Possibly the best example of an inexplicable connection between empathy, guilt, and depression comes

from the phenomenon of ‘survivor guilt', observed initially by Niederland (1961) who studied the severe depression and anxiety in survivors of Nazi concentration camps. He discovered that people suffered from severe guilt simply for being alive while their families had been killed by the Nazis. The survivors felt guilty as if their own survival had somehow caused the death of their families, although that certainly was not true. Based on Neiderland’s research, Modell (1971) expanded the construct to include the guilt people feel when they believe they are harming others by being happy or successful. He observed that individuals with the symptoms of depression frequently believe that if they were successful, happy or simply lucky, it would be at the expense of others; the less fortunate friends or family members would suffer as a result, because -as people with depression believed-there must be a limit on how much ‘good' can be had.

In more recent studies O'Connor and colleagues (1997) found significant associations between survivor guilt, empathy, and depression. The researchers argue that survivor guilt is an empathic emotion often occurring with conscious awareness. For example, people may experience this type of guilt when they get their paper accepted for publication, while a friend's article has just been rejected. Similarly, we may feel guilty when we are healthy and we hear that our friend has been diagnosed with cancer. Furthermore, the presence of survivor guilt is often marked by submissive behaviour: we may act as if we are lower in status (or less healthy or less fortunate) than the person for whom we feel sorry. The destructive effect of survivor guilt may come to our attention only after we experience serious costs (such as, for example, depression), in an effort to ‘make things fair'.

In sum, the available empirical evidence seems to suggest that there is indeed a link between empathy and depression: people who experience the symptoms of depression show enhanced levels of empathy. Although there is no definite indication of what would be the causal direction of such relation, researchers suggest that guilt, more than any other factors, is responsible for enhanced levels of empathy in depression. The hypothesis is such that people suffering from depression show more empathy towards the pain of others because they feel guilty; they feel guilty because they implicitly perceive other people’s misfortune as their own

‘fault’.

This perpetual relation between guilt, depression, and empathy seems to be a vicious circle:

one feels guilty for other’s misfortune because one has depression; but, at the same time, the guilt-motivated empathy increases one’s depressive symptoms. Even more interestingly, this conclusion might be hiding a possible answer to an old paradox of depression, explicated in the fact that the illness makes the person increasingly focused on herself (indeed people with depression are often labelled as ‘selfish’ or ‘egoistic’), but it enhances the person’s levels of empathy towards others. Could guilt be the key to this apparent tension? In other words, is it possible that the enhanced empathy observed in depression is not shaped by one’s genuine concern about others, but – rather sadly – it comes as yet another mean of self-focused concern? By perceiving another person’s pain as one’s own fault, one directs one’s worry towards oneself, becoming once again the protagonist of the story. That which is seen as empathy by an observer (and indeed the same neuropsychological patterns are observed in the presence of empathy), might, in fact, constitute a mere rumination of a self-themed fantasy. In the next section, I develop this idea further, based on research on different types of self-conceptualisation in empathy.