Department of Psychology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
PLoS One. 2018 Apr 12;13(4):e0195590. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0195590. eCollection 2018.
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.
作为一种重要的道德情感，内疚在社会互动中起着关键作用。研究发现，人们在内疚的情况下往往会表现出亲社会行为。然而，所有现有的研究主要集中在内疚对宏观行为的影响上。到目前为止，还没有研究调查内疚是否会影响人们的微观感知。本研究通过考察内疚是否影响人们感知趋近运动的倾向来填补这一空白。我们通过探测面向观看者的偏见（FTV 偏见）来实现这一目标。具体来说，当通过点光显示技术向参与者呈现一个模糊的行走生物运动显示时，参与者往往会感知到一个行走的代理人正在向他们走来。我们假设内疚会调节 FTV 偏见。为了检验这一假设，我们采用了两人情境诱导任务来诱导内疚，让参与者感到由于自己表现不佳，他们的搭档没有得到满意的报酬。我们发现，当参与者被告知感知到的生物运动是从他们的搭档那里捕捉到的，内疚组的 FTV 偏见相对于中性组显著增加。然而，当参与者被告知感知到的生物运动来自于第三个中立的代理人时，内疚并没有调节 FTV 偏见。这些结果表明，内疚会影响人们感知趋近运动的倾向，但这种影响仅限于内疚所指向的人。
