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Show liven though excessive amounts ol'uilt can he liai infill in-fill a Weber Slate College professor pro-fessor said thai a society with no guilt could never exist. "WITHOUT guilt our society socie-ty would be totally chaotic, I can't think of a society that doesn't have guilt," said Dr. Joseph J. Hoi vat, assistant professor of psychology at Weber Stale. lloival said that the main role of guilt in society is to act as a restraint that allows people peo-ple to live with one another. Without guilt, he said, people would have few qualms about murder, rape, theft and a host of other crimes. THE WKliKR Slale psychologist psycho-logist explained that guilt is first developed during childhood child-hood from parents who use "no behavior" and punishment. punish-ment. He said, "We all have an inborn in-born ability to feel guilt, but guilt itself is learned." HE ADDED, "Different people feel guilty about different diffe-rent things, it depends on how they're brought up." (luill first begins as an external exter-nal element, taught by parents and society, but llorvat noted that as the child grows the guilt usually becomes internalized. HE EXPLAINED, "There's a difference between shame and guilt. Shame is feeling sorry sor-ry because someone found out you stole a candy bar from the store, (iuilt would be fell even if nobody knows. That's when it's been internalized. He noted that while people have always experienced guilt the things they feel guilly about ab-out have changed. TWENTY YEARS ago an unwed mother would have had guilt for having a baby out of wedlock, today those feelings are not as prevalent. llorvat said, "Parents are not ihe sole determiner of guilt. Religion, friends, society and our own notion of Tightness Tight-ness or wrongness also play a significant part." HIT WHILE the professor noted that guilt can be healthy and useful, it can also be destructive des-tructive If taken to extremes. There is a fine line, he said, between the positive and negative nega-tive aspects of guilt. "To such a point where people peo-ple can't handle it and take it to the extremes then that's when they have gone too far," he said. IIORVAT SAID that there-are there-are some who become so obsessed with feeling guilty that it causes them to cease to function normally. Others, he said, feel guilty about things over which they have no control, con-trol, such as in the case of rape. Still others never develop any guilt at all and feel no remorse for anything they do. He said, " I he army under Hitler felt guilt if they did not persecute the Jews. They have been taught to feel guilty if they felt any compassion for their suffering. Here's a case when a whole society developed de-veloped a warped sense of guilt." THE PSYCHOLOGIST added that while what people feel guilty about has changed people still experience guilt. "We're not becoming a guiltless guilt-less society." Horvat said. "For guilt to be exceptionally negative or exceptionally ex-ceptionally positive depends on how the individual deals with it." |
