Guilt, Psychological Well-Being and Religiosity in Contemporary Cinema

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article I has been asked for review is interesting and provokes reflection. The author shows how guilt is shown in the contemporary cinema. However, in my opinion, the conclusions formulated by the author go too far and are therefore unjustified. The author puts forward the thesis that post-modernism has changed the approach to truth and norms and has built a context in which subjects define norms which are their reference point for guilt. I agree that people’s beliefs are expressed in movies, so it is very interesting when someone “reads” the message of them. However, reading this article also raises some doubts as to the assumptions underlying the analysis. They are as follows:

1) The analysis was built on the assumption that guilt is a consequence of a transgression of the norms. The norm, on the other hand, is seen as either given by God or as developed in social relationships. The author therefore assumes a deontological theory in ethics. If, however, deontological theory were not the basis of the analysis, but consequentialism, then the guilt would be related to the effects of the action, recognized in one’s own experience. According to consequentialism, norms refer to moral good and evil discovered in direct cognition, not anchored in culture; norms are an attempt to grasp what has been discovered in experience. According to deontological theory, the norm is primary, good and evil are the consequence of the norm. In many cases, deontologism is the basis for drawing caricatured conclusions, for example in the story from the movie Mission. This suggests that the main character was guilty because he discovered that his act was against the norm. In other words, he would have had no remorse for killing his brother if a different set of norms were the benchmark for his judgment.

2) It is also assumed that the essence of Christianity is to conform to norms and the task of the religious community is to enforce these norms. Firstly, it is difficult for such conclusions to be made that are common to all Christian communities. Secondly, such an image that the author assumes is certainly far from the truth as far as it relates to Catholic theology. In the twentieth century, Catholic theology developed under the influence of personalism, inspired not only by the theory of the person, but also by the philosophy of dialogue and existentialism. Consequently, sin is not understood as exceeding a God-established norm (and as a debt), but as a lack of relationship with God. In this perspective, Job cited in the article cannot be treated as a role model. He is religious, he follows all the norms and rituals, but he has no relationship with God. When he loses everything and his wife and friends pull away from him and suspect sin, he turns directly to God. He's doing something he hasn't done before. In response, he hears God's voice. And he concludes: "My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you." In this perspective, the experience of suffering makes sense for Job. It can be inferred that God caused this experience so that Job would stop offering sacrifices to God, but discover God and start talking to him! Likewise, original sin is understood from a relationship perspective. In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, original sin is called a sin in an analogous sense because it is not caused by an act, but it includes consequences. Understanding original sin can be compared to the situation of a child who is taken away from the family home by one of the parents (breaking contact with his spouse). The child makes no decision, but bears the consequences of the parent's decision. The child cannot experience the love of the other parent because the first parent has left home. Original sin is understood as the lack of a relationship with God; as an inability to "look in the face of God." Moreover, as a consequence of the relational understanding of sin, the sacrament of penance is not seen as a kind of judgment, but it is the place where man meets God and experiences the power that makes it possible to deal with one's own weakness.

After reading this text, I come to the conclusion that the basis of the analysis is greatly simplified beliefs about good, evil and guilt. I am not a psychologist, but reading the text causes disappointment with psychology as a science trapped in schemas (in this case, the basis of this schema is deontologism, to which the whole picture of reality is subordinated). Unfortunately, this adjustment to the schema of deontological theory implies a distorted picture of Christianity.

3) As a consequence of the assumptions made, the author puts forward the thesis that: "post-modernity placing the criterion of truth in individual judgment, has also drastically reduced the demands that Western society imposes on those who live their spiritual beliefs in accordance with the religious or moral principles of the churches or majority ethical systems. ”Thus, the author sees cultural change as the sources of contemporary changes in relation to guilt. However, if in the 20th century theology developed under the influence of such trends as personalism, existentialism and the philosophy of dialogue, In this area, the reasons for changing the approach to sin and guilt should also be looked for. I therefore argue that the conclusions formulated by the author go too far.

As the analyses themselves are valuable and show how a modern man can deal with guilt, I suggest that the author soften the conclusions that he is able to draw from the research he has carried out, and that in the introduction he show the weaknesses of the assumptions that he adopts as a foundation for research.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your comments. In response to your reflections we would like to clarify some aspects that have to do with the criticisms of our approach.

The experience of guilt is personal, but, unlike other emotions it cannot be understood as a biological response to objective conditions. If it does not have a genetic origin it must emanate from somewhere else. How this complex configuration of psychological processes, that today we call "guilt feeling", is constructed, can be understood from different approaches. Our approach does not take into account the possible intervention of God or other forces outside the natural world. In our article we have pointed out that this is one way of understanding the appearance of guilt ("What we know today as the feeling of guilt has been situated in the Christian theological tradition as a faculty of the moral conscience that is a gift granted by God in a universal way that allows us to distinguish between good and evil and that guides behavior by means of joy or guilt (Elders, 1983; Torelló, 1972). (176-180)". Being respectful with this vision, it is not ours.

Something similar happens with the consequentialist perspective. To accept a starting point in which the possibility of "direct cognition, not anchored in culture" is far from the canon that serves as a reference in our scientific proceeding. However, our perspective from social Psychology does not imply accepting positivist behaviorist approaches that annul human agency, but we consider that these processes are the result of the historical evolution of cultural processes and therefore a consequence of rich human interaction.

Nevertheless, your comments have been carefully analyzed, which has led us to change many sentences of the introduction and discussion so that those who do not share our theoretical approaches can interpret our research from a perspective other than their own.

Thank you,

The Authors.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for the invitation to review the article "Guilt, Psychological Well-being and Religiosity in Contemporary Cinema."The manuscript provides a lot of interesting insight and is based on existing knowledge about guilt from fields ranging from law to psychology. 
If I had to draw attention to anything, it would be the redundant use of the term psychological well- being in the title. This term in psychology usually refers to a eudaimonistic understanding of well-being (Carol Ryff). The author(s) do not stick rigidly to this term. They refer more to contentment, satisfaction, and sometimes a sense of relief. If there is another option, I suggest you think about it. 
And a technical note - in the 32nd line there is an abbreviation E/R - earlier there is no explanation what it refers to. Unless it is S/R and there is a typo.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your input and judgments about our article.

In reference to your contributions, we have corrected the problem of abbreviations.

Regarding the use of the concept of psychological well-being, we have just two arguments. We understand that the redundant use of psychological well-being refers to the article and not to the title. In this sense, and taking as very interesting the contributions of Carol Ryff regarding the articulation and measurement of some factors related to well-being, our approach includes a broader view of psychological well-being, where negative emotions have a place, giving way to one of Ryff's explanations that well-being is related, in some cultures, to the arithmetic of positive and negative emotions.

Thank you,

The Authors.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

With pleasure I read your article. It is well documented and original. I only have some comments on the methodology applied, or better, the movies that were used as a corpus. How many in the end were in the corpus? 89? 25? Or 25 + 'added films'? (see your lines 251-258)

I would like to see a list of ALL movies chosen, in an appendix for example?

And I would like to see some words on the question to what extent these movies are representative. That is also part of the game.

Then I would like to see what movies played a role in the 3.1-3.5 models. You do mention certain movies, indeed, but I would like to see what movies exactly found themselves fitting in a certain model.

For example in line 494 you write: 'A small group of films analyzed....' and then you mention Atonement and The Words (498, 499) and later on Yesterday (522). So for model 3.4 there are only three movies? And you justify your conclusions for this model on three movies only? By the way: better put the movies in italics, as they are titles.

 

Then, I do not get the abbreviation E/R mentioned the first time in line 32. You did mention the abbreviation S/R in line 24 (spirituality and religiosity) but for E/R yuo say sth like: 'a protective factor against suicide' (line 32-33). I must have missed sth here. Can you explain this?

Furthermore I would not start the abstract with the first sentence. What the hell is 'the deep epistemological change introduced by post-modernity'? In general I would advise the author(s) to use simple language. Why not?

Then, do not use words like 'well-known' such as in line 25 because the study mentioned was not well-known to me at all. Sorry!

Check references. In line 25 you mention Koenig twice.

 

Author Response

Thank you for your comments; they have been very helpful in improving the manuscript. These are our changes from your suggestions:

We have changed the sample description to avoid confusion from the original text. The analysis process was done in phases of varying intensity. After viewing the initial sample frame of 94 films indicated in the abstract (89 was a typo), a complete and exhaustive initial analysis of the 25 most cited films allowed us to discover five patterns of guilt expression. From there, the rest of the films were analyzed in depth (with the indicated criteria) until the same categories were continuously repeated (saturated).That happened with the film 42. All these films are cited in the References section.  From that point on, the detailed analysis stopped.

We did not intend to make a quantitative analysis of the weight of each of the models of cinematic expression of guilt. We believe that would be another study, which we do not rule out for the future, but it would require a different methodology. Our purpose was to discover whether alternative models to the Judeo-Christian one appear in commercial cinema, not the weight that each of them has in Occidental cinematography. The only one of the models in which quantitative allusion is made to the films is precisely the most minority one in which, effectively, we only find these three films. In the other four models, a larger number of films are mentioned in each of them, but we believe that assigning each film to a block could generate more doubts in the reader.

Although we do not believe it is pertinent to assign films to blocks, we attach the list of the 94 films viewed for your information.

We have changed the expression 'the deep epistemological change introduced by post-modernity'.

We have replaced "well-known" with "relevant".

We have changed the typos E/R throughout the text to S/R. Sorry.

We have corrected Koenig's tipo.

We have put the movies in italics

Thank you,

The authors.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I appreciate the changes introduced by the authors. I perceive the article as valuable and recommend the article for publication.