This dissertation aims at distinguishing guilt from shame and examining their persuasive effects on information processing and attitude change. Two studies are conducted to investigate the extent to which controllability separates guilt from shame and whether guilt and shame vary in their effects on information processing and attitude change.The first study is grounded in the Attributional Theory of Achievement Motivation and Emotion (Weiner, 1985). In study 1, 173 participants recalled a failure or transgression experience and content analysis was performed to determine the controllability of the experience and participants' feelings of guilt and shame. In study 2 which is framed under the Cognitive Functional Model (CFM, Nabi, 1999), the level of controllability, causal agency, and argument strength were manipulate and tested with 403 participants. The effects of guilt and shame on information processing and attitude change were assessed.Both studies indicate that controllability had only limited power in distinguishing guilt from shame. Guilt overlapped with shame when self was the causal agency for a transgression whereas the conceptual overlap decreased when the other person was the causal agency. Guilt and shame differed from one another in their effects on information processing, and motivation tendencies were found to mediate the relationship between emotion and information processing. Guilt and shame also varied in their impacts on attitude change. This study provides support for the proposed emotionmotivation tendency information processing causal chain and the proposed distinctive functions of guilt and shame in changing attitudes. Theoretical implications of this study for conceptualizing the effects of emotion on information processing and attitude change are discussed, and practical implications for campaign designs are provided.
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