1. Introduction
Morality can be defined as a set of prescriptive norms concerning others’ welfare, rights, fairness, and justice [
1,
2]. It refers to the way people choose to live their lives according to a set of principles that lead their decisions about what is right or wrong, good or evil. Theoretical constructs of morality can be considered as consisting of three main dimensions: a pure cognitive aspect regarding moral reasoning (e.g., a specific type of reasoning, by which moral principles provide the grounds for moral judgments) [
3]; moral behaviours (e.g., expression of behaviours that benefit society) [
4]; and moral emotions (e.g., shame, guilt, sympathy, and empathy) [
5].
Seeds of morality emerge early in children with typical trajectories of development. Young children (i.e., 2–3 years old) spontaneously engage in prosocial behaviours and, conversely, want to avoid antisocial behaviour [
6,
7]. Regarding moral reasoning, from preschool age onwards, children show an ability to recognise and protest injustice or harmful behaviour [
8,
9,
10,
11], suggesting that children grasp concepts of harm and unfairness. Regarding moral emotions, Frick et al. [
12] argued that, while in early childhood it may be difficult to distinguish between moral emotions, they become more differentiated over development, with guilt becoming more specifically related to prosocial behaviour [
13]. Therefore, as children become adolescents, they able to integrate cognitive, emotional, and behavioural aspects of their morality by applying their moral judgments and emotions to social situations while they coordinate competing concerns in different contexts [
14].
Among moral emotions, guilt is the one more strongly associated with morality (especially with prosocial behaviours). It is believed that it influences human behaviour, particularly when transgressions that violate social prescriptions happen. Indeed, guilt has been defined as thoughts and feelings of distress associated with transgressions [
15,
16,
17]. Moreover, in the field of social psychology, guilt is considered an adaptive emotion able to improve social relationships through the development of an empathic concern for the well-being of others [
18,
19,
20].
Always adopting an interpersonal view of guilt, some authors [
21] relate the moral emotion of guilt with the perceived sense of personal responsibility by sustaining that guilt is a moral emotion composed of five factors (including distress and beliefs about responsibility) interacting with each other. In this view, the magnitude of guilt is proportional to the relative importance of each factor, namely, to perceived responsibility.
Responsibility can be described as the belief that a person possesses a pivotal power to provoke or prevent crucial negative consequences of their behaviour [
22]. Results have shown that a perceived sense of responsibility is mediated by guilt, even if the contrary is not true [
23]. This result highlights that those differences in guilt, although strongly influenced by responsibility, cannot be accounted for entirely in terms of responsibility [
24,
25].
Therefore, considering all the above, adolescents are called upon to find the right balance between social and personal demands on moral issues. Obstacles to this balance can lead to symptom spectra, such as obsessive–compulsive disorder on one hand or conduct disorders on the other.
In obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), a strong sensitivity to guilt is considered a crucial element, particularly in cognitive-behavioural models [
22,
25,
26,
27,
28]. Excessive responsibility (also called ‘inflated responsibility’) has been suggested as a central cognitive variable associated with this disorder [
22,
26,
29,
30,
31,
32]. In this view, obsessions and compulsive behaviours take place in order to avoid situations that can trigger guilt, namely, to avoid the perception of being responsible for the occurrence of negative events [
33]. These possible negative outcomes are perceived as essential to prevent. They may be actual, i.e., having consequences in the real world, and/or at a moral level [
34]. Results from numerous studies using questionnaires [
35] or experimental manipulations [
36] suggest that obsessive symptoms are aimed at preventing, reducing, or neutralising the possibility of being guilty and responsible [
37], sustaining evidence for such a link between responsibility and obsessive–compulsive symptoms. In OCD, an excessive engagement to deontological morality is present [
28,
38,
39], which leads in turn to hyper-prudential checking behaviours. Control of thought processes and obsessive doubts are useful to avoid deontological guilt and a sense of responsibility [
28]. In OC patients, the possibility of being guilty is evaluated by itself as a catastrophe, and it is represented as something unforgivable and unbearable [
28,
40]. On the other hand, the feeling of guilt can work as a signal of a possible looming threat (‘If I feel guilty, the event I have to prevent will occur’) [
41]. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), it is possible to make a diagnosis of OCD even in children and, moreover, the early-onset of obsessive–compulsive disorder is one of the more common mental illnesses of children and adolescents, with a prevalence of 1% to 3% [
42]. Furthermore, clinical manifestations of OCD in adolescents are very similar to those observed in adults [
42,
43].
On the opposite side of an imaginary morality continuum seems to be the conduct disorder (CD) diagnosis, which results in aggressive and antisocial behaviours. In fact, some authors consider it as the outcome of a total lack of morality. Recent studies have shown that guilt has the role of inhibiting antisocial behaviour [
44,
45,
46,
47] and plays a central role in predicting a high level of antisocial conduct. Diffusion of responsibility [
48], a phenomenon in which people, when in a group, feel less responsible for the negative outcome of their behaviour compared to a situation in which they act alone, has been found to be the primary reason for increased antisocial and aggressive behaviours. Numerous studies have reported that, in people with problematic conduct, a fearless temperament, marked by behavioural disinhibition, prepares for a lack of moral reasoning that does not allow these patients to gain an internal system of rules [
49,
50]. These results seem to show that the total absence of guilt and empathy combine to predict very high levels of antisocial behaviours, proactive aggression, and school bullying [
51,
52]. As previously noted, empathy and guilt are considered moral emotions because they help to encourage prosocial behaviours [
53]. Adolescents with CD are described as not feeling guilty [
12]. Normally, developing children will increasingly internalise moral attributions and judgments [
54]. However, this process of internalisation will be hindered if the negative arousal associated with guilt is attenuated due to the child’s temperament [
12]. An opposite view about patients with a CD diagnosis posits that they feel guilty but consider anti-social purposes, such as dominance for example [
55], as more important compared to moral purposes [
56]. It could be plausible that these patients do have an internal system of moral rules but that they are considered at the same level as conventional ones [
57]. Thus, the outcome of aggressive behaviours is a mechanism of moral disengagement [
58] that acts by leading the deontological guilt to decrease. In line with this view, it might be assumed that patients with CD feel guilty, but this emotion is assessed as something from which to defend themselves. The lack of credit to morality also depends on the limited importance of moral goals compared to the high relevance of antisocial goals, including dominance, for example [
55]. In this view, moral lack can occur not because of a patient’s lack of empathy or their fearless temperament, but because patients diagnosed with CD do not picture the moral consequences of the pain they can induce in others [
56]. Namely, they may not anticipate the feeling of guilt or excess responsibility that would result from hurting others. Finally, clinical experience highlights how some beliefs in CD children (‘Authorities and their rules are unreliable and arbitrary’; ‘Nobody really cares about me’; ‘Since I have suffered, then the world is in credit to me’) induce the child to renounce affiliation with healthy peer groups [
59] and to consider subordination to authority as useless and dangerous [
60].
Therefore, in our opinion, although OCD and CD express a different symptomatology in adolescents, they could represent different answers to a common matrix about morality. In both diagnoses, an excessive sense of responsibility seems to be something that is unacceptable. In OC diagnosis, the patient feels guilty, and the sense of responsibility is hard to accept; the patient has to reassure themselves to not feel guilty and is not forgiving until a solution is found. In CD patients, the adolescent at first feels guilty and then tries to defend themselves by acting with anger to the authorities, who are considered unfair [
61], by showing themselves to be someone who does not care about other people’s feelings, pain, and suffering.
Self-forgiveness and interpersonal forgiveness could represent a variable that determines the shift into a disorder or into the other. Our hypothesis is that this variable, i.e., the ability to forgive, might modulate different behavioural outcomes.
Forgiveness has been shown to be an effective aspect in regulation of negative emotions [
62,
63,
64]. It has been defined as ‘a willingness to abandon one’s right to resentment, negative judgement, and indifferent behaviour towards one who has unjustly hurt us’ [
65]. When people forgive, there is a reduction in angry and resentful emotions, thoughts and behaviours, and an increase in positive and benevolent ones towards the offending person [
66]. It has also been reported that promoting forgiveness increases anger control and reduces trait anger and anger expressions [
67,
68]. The forgiving inclination may act as a protective factor against the detrimental effects of dysfunctional behaviours triggered by anger. Most of the literature, in studying forgiveness, often refers to the willingness to forgive others when a wrongdoing has been done. In fact, although the recent literature has paid remarkable attention to the role of forgiveness in interpersonal relationships, less effort has been put into studying self-forgiveness. In the psychological literature, self-forgiveness has been defined as ‘a willingness to abandon self-resentment in the face of one’s own acknowledged objective wrong, while fostering compassion, generosity, and love toward oneself’ [
65] (p. 115). Some research on the topic found that being unable to forgive oneself is associated with lower self-esteem and life satisfaction and higher neuroticism, depression, anxiety, and hostility [
69,
70,
71,
72]. In addition, Thompson and colleagues [
69] introduced another dimension of forgiveness, namely, situation-forgiveness, defined as the willingness to forgive situations beyond anyone’s control (e.g., an illness or natural disaster).
Considering the abovementioned literature, in the present study performed on a non-clinical adolescent sample, the role of forgiveness in responsibility and guilt levels was investigated. We additionally tested whether this putative relation was influenced by tendencies towards obsessive–compulsive problems (OCP) or conduct problems (CP), i.e., whether forgiveness mediated the effect of OCD or CD symptoms on guilt and responsibility.
3. Results
Mean and standard deviations of all measures taken into account as part of the study are reported in
Table 1.
Correlational analysis revealed no significant relations among two problematic tendencies and age. CP levels were negatively related to guilt levels to a significant degree, and no significant correlations were found with three types of forgiveness and responsibility. Conversely, higher levels of OCP were found to be negatively related to self-forgiveness and situation-forgiveness and positively related to responsibility levels. No significant correlation was found between OCP and guilt. See
Table 2 for the correlational analysis results.
The first regression analysis showed that age (B = −2.304; β = −0.134; t = −2.179; p = 0.030) and self-forgiveness (B = 0.938; β = 0.403; t = 6.704; p = 0.000) significantly predicted responsibility levels, explaining almost 20% of the total of variance (R2adj = 0.177; F3227 = 17.488; p = 0.000). The results revealed in detail that higher levels of self-forgiveness, along with younger age, predicted lower levels of perceived responsibility. The second regression analysis revealed that self-forgiveness (B = −0.347; β = −0.275; t = −3.509; p = 0.001) and situation-forgiveness (B = 0.214; β = 0.188; t = 2.229; p = 0.001) significantly predicted guilt levels. Specifically, lower levels of self-forgiveness and higher levels of situation-forgiveness predicted higher levels of guilt (R2adj = 0.067; F3225 = 14.315; p = 0.001).
The mediation analyses were carried out using the PROCESS 3.1 macro for SPSS [
78]. It employs a bootstrapping method for estimating indirect effects; 95% bias-corrected confidence intervals were calculated through 5000 bootstrap samples. From the variety of models proposed by the program, representative of different conceptual models, Model 4 was tested because it considers the effect of IV on the DV through mediators. Specifically, further mediational analyses were conducted that considered the regression results, namely, by not considering others-forgiveness in models in which the DV was guilt and not considering situation-forgiveness and others-forgiveness in models in which the DV was responsibility.
Mediational analysis tested the model in which OCP was inserted as the IV and guilt as the DV; self-forgiveness and situation-forgiveness were settled as putative mediators, revealing that OCP does not exert significant direct and total effects on guilt levels, but rather has an indirect effect through the occurrence of both self-forgiveness and situation-forgiveness (
Table 3). A suppression effect [
79] was probably revealed: namely, a non-significant total effect of the IV on the DV due to the opposite in sign direct and indirect effects of the IV on the DV. Specifically, higher OCP led both self- and situation-forgiveness to decrease, which in turn led guilt levels to increase (self-forgiveness) and to decrease (situation-forgiveness). This resulted in a positive indirect effect exerted by self-forgiveness, by increasing guilt, and a negative indirect effect through situation-forgiveness, by decreasing guilt (
Figure 1).
The same mediational analysis, with the same DV and putative mediators, was then carried out, replacing OCP with CP. The results showed no effects of CP on either self- or situation-forgiveness. Higher CP levels led guilt to decrease, but no indirect effects were revealed (
Table 4).
Two further mediational analyses were conducted to test mediation models in which the effect of OCP or CP on responsibility was mediated by self-forgiveness. The first analysis revealed that higher OCP led responsibility levels to increase both directly and indirectly through self-forgiveness. That is, higher OCP levels led self-forgiveness to decrease, which in turn led responsibility scores to decrease: the multiplication of these effects gave a positive indirect effect such that higher OCP levels led responsibility to increase through the mediation of self-forgiveness (
Table 5 and
Figure 2).
The second mediational analysis was carried out assuming that the effect of CP on responsibility levels was mediated by self-forgiveness, but this analysis actually showed no significant effects (either direct or indirect) of the IV on the DV (
Table 6).
4. Discussion
The aim of the present study was to investigate the role of forgiveness in the modulation of guilt and responsibility in a non-clinical sample of adolescents. Specifically, in the present study, the role of forgiveness was investigated in regard to responsibility and guilt levels, and we tested whether this putative relation was influenced by tendencies towards OCP or CP, i.e., whether specific dimensions of forgiveness mediate the effect of OCD or CD symptoms on guilt and responsibility.
Regarding the role of guilt in the two problematic trends (i.e., OCP and CP), our results confirmed the hypothesis that high levels of OCP are strongly related with high sensitivity to guilt [
22,
26,
27,
28], confirming that in OCD, the control of thought processes and obsessive doubt seem to be useful tools to avoid an ethical sense of guilt [
28]. However, in relation to the absence of a correlation found between the OCP and TOSCA-A scores, we believe that this data may be due to the inability of the latter tool to grasp two different types of guilt, i.e., deontological and altruistic [
56]. Our results also demonstrated that adolescents with a tendency towards CD actually feel guilty, in contrast to the position of Frick (2014), but less than adolescents without this problematic tendency, supporting alternative hypotheses for which they first feel guilty but develop processes that lead them to consider antisocial purposes as more important compared to moral purposes [
56]; alternatively, they have an internal system of moral rules, but these rules are considered at the same level as conventional ones [
57]. Regarding responsibility, our results confirmed only its role in the OCP tendency, whilst no effect was observed in CP. While these results support the idea that excessive responsibility is a central cognitive variable associated with OCP [
22,
26,
29,
30,
31,
32], they also suggest that, in adolescents with a tendency towards CP, no different levels of responsibility are observed compared to adolescents without this tendency. Taken together, our results regarding guilt and responsibility levels in adolescents with tendencies towards OCP or CP seem to confirm our hypothesis that although OCD and CD express a different symptomatology in adolescence, they could represent different answers to a common matrix about morality. Further research considering clinical samples are needed in order to better delineate these trajectories in diagnosed patients.
Regarding the role of forgiveness in levels of responsibility and experienced guilt, our results revealed that self-forgiveness has an important role in modulating levels of a sense of responsibility, while either self-forgiveness or situation-forgiveness play a crucial role in guilt levels. In both regression analyses, the R
2 values were not very high, with a very low coefficient in the regression that had guilt as the DV; this was probably because few putative predictors were inserted in the model. Indeed, guilt and responsibility are very complex constructs in which many variables (see, for example, social context and external models of emotion regulation) not considered in the present study have a modulating role. Therefore, further research considering a wider set of putative predictors is needed in order to improve our comprehension of the relationship between self-forgiveness, guilt, and responsibility. Moreover, mediation analyses revealed that two types of forgiveness (i.e., self- and situation-forgiveness) mediated the effect of OCP tendency on guilt levels. Furthermore, self-forgiveness mediated the role of OCP on responsibility levels. Regarding the effect of CP on guilt, this was not mediated by forgiveness. No effects of CP on responsibility levels were revealed. Thus, our results confirmed the need to include self-forgiveness in future models of forgiveness [
72,
80,
81] for both theoretical and clinical implications. Moreover, the results of the present study highlight for the first time how the relation between self-forgiveness, guilt, and responsibility could lead to pathological outcomes, such as OCD. In fact, although our study was performed on a non-clinical sample, as Mancini and colleagues [
43] stated, there is a ‘connection between normal and pathological obsessions and thus a similarity in the cognitive processes involved’, suggesting that non-clinical and clinical samples may differ more in degree than in kind [
82]. In other words, in adolescents with higher levels of OCP, an increase in guilt and responsibility is considered to be something unacceptable and something to defend oneself against; these adolescents do not forgive themselves until they find a solution. The relationship between an inflated sense of responsibility and guilt and low proneness to self-forgiveness could be considered a vicious cycle underlying OCD. The present results seem to support its necessity in OCD: as stated by Barcaccia, Tenore, and Mancini [
83], ’besides the already available treatments, it would be advantageous to design protocols aimed […] at developing a more general compassionate and forgiving stance towards oneself’ [
84,
85].
On the contrary, adolescents with higher CP levels experience guilt, albeit less than the rest of the sample and even if it is not affected by the degree of forgiveness. This result could be in line with a hypothesis in which CD patients at first feel guilty and then try to defend themselves by appearing to be someone who does not care about other people’s feelings, pain, and suffering.
Finally, forgiveness of the situation, namely, the willingness to forgive situations beyond anyone’s control (for example, an illness or a natural disaster), was also a significant predictor of the level of guilt in our results, confirming the importance of considering it in further conceptual models. More specifically, our results showed that adolescents who experienced higher levels of forgiveness of the situation experienced more guilt. This seems to represent a process whereby people who are faced with internal or external events (for example, an illness) are called upon to decide whether or not they have personal responsibility for that situation. When they attribute responsibility to themselves, then the situation (external or internal) is ‘discharged’.