Guilt leads to enhanced facing-the-viewer bias

<div><p>As an important moral emotion, guilt plays a critical role in social interaction. It has been found that people tended to exhibit prosocial behavior under circumstances of guilt. However, all extant studies have predominantly focused on the influence of guilt on macro-level behavior. So far, no study has investigated whether guilt affects people’s micro-level perception. The current study closes this gap by examining whether guilt affects one’s inclination to perceive approaching motion. We achieved this aim by probing a facing-the-viewer bias (FTV bias). Specifically, when an ambiguous walking biological motion display is presented to participants via the point-light display technique, participants tend to perceive a walking agent approaching them. We hypothesized that guilt modulated FTV bias. To test this hypothesis, we adopted a two-person situation induction task to induce guilt, whereby participants were induced to feel that because of their poor task performance, their partner did not receive a satisfactory payment. We found that when participants were told that the perceived biological motion was motion-captured from their partner, the FTV bias was significantly increased for guilty participants relative to neutral participants. However, when participants were informed that the perceived biological motion was from a third neutral agent, the FTV bias was not modulated by guilt. These results suggest that guilt influences one’s inclination to perceive approaching motion, but this effect is constrained to the person towards whom guilt is directed.</p></div

Score for the first five questions in Experiment 1 (error bars represent standard errors).

<p>Score for the first five questions in Experiment 1 (error bars represent standard errors).</p

Diagrammatical explanation of the 2-D view of the 3-D projection space.

<p>The solid gray lines represent the projection lines of the perspective projections (3 field-of-view angles: 87°, 58°, and 31°). These three angles were determined via a pilot experiment (<i>n</i> = 8): 58° was the point of subjective ambiguity when perceiving ambiguous BM (i.e., 50% perception of motion towards participants and 50% perception of motion away); at 31°, participants were inclined to judge the BM display as walking towards them, while at 87°, participants were inclined to judge the BM display as walking away. The gray dots represent projection plane. The black dots represent the point-light walker which is walking away from the projection plane.</p

Results of Experiment 2 (error bars represent standard errors).

<p>Results of Experiment 2 (error bars represent standard errors).</p

Score of each question in Experiment 2 (error bar stands for standard error).

<p>Score of each question in Experiment 2 (error bar stands for standard error).</p