About Feeling Guilty

Girls, have you done something you feel guilty about recently? It could have more to do with your gender than your conscience, according to recent research that suggests that women are programmed to feel more guilt than men.

The academics made their conclusions after asking three groups – 156 teenagers, 96 young people and 108 older adults, split equally between men and women – to answer questions about what made them feel guilty, and to rank their guilt and their empathy towards others. The study was published in the Spanish Journal of Psychology.

According to the study by Spanish psychologists of University of the Basque Country, women are more likely to feeling guilt, while men are programmed to feel less guilty about their actions, especially those aged between 25 and 33. Middle-aged women tend to feel the most guilt about their actions.

The psychologist leading the study suggested that women may feel more guilt because they are socially conditioned to feel guilty about their actions when growing up.

What do you think? How often do you feel guilty?

About the study result, I won’t make a pro or contra position here. As you may already notice, women are still socialized into putting others first. From an early age women are taught that relationships are very important. It may cause internal conflict: do you set healthy limitations and risk disappointing someone else or sacrifice your own best interests to support someone else’s expectations?

Men, on the other hand, are taught that they are individuals from babyhood. They function easily as independent decision-makers, often times extending their decision-making talents to include making decisions for other family members.

What can you learn, as women, from men who not only refuse to feel guilty for most of their decisions? Let’s go through our days without uttering the phrase that seems to follow any decision that has our best interests in mind, “I feel so bad….” or thinking you’re a bad person for setting a healthy limitations. Would you try doing it? (I’ll try it!).

I don’t ask you to be a more selfish person here; but since that we ‘have been programmed’, we should try harder to reduce expressing feeling guilty if we haven’t done wrong things…Source: examiner.com and google
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