Investigation of the Effects of Authoritarian vs. Democratic Parental Attitudes, and Parental Attachment on Shame and Guilt by Quasi-Experimental Method

In this research, the effects of authoritarian-democratic parental attitudes and children’s attachment to parents, on emotions of guilt and shame, were investigated. Authoritarian-democratic parental attitudes have been manipulated through vignettes presented to the participants, and emotions of guilt and shame have been measured in a scenario-based manner. To this end, two quasi-experimental studies have been carried out. A total of 143 primary school students, 72 in the first study (41 females, 31 males), and 71 in the second study (37 females, 34 males) participated in the research. In the first study, parental attachments were obtained before the manipulation, and they were included in the MANCOVA as a covariant variable. According to the results, attachment to the mother had a significant main effect on shame. On the other hand, authoritarian-democratic parental attitudes did not have significant effects either on guilt or on shame. Therefore, attachments to the parents were measured after the manipulation in order to eradicate its priming effect on emotions in the second study. The second study showed that both insecure attachments to the mother and to the father have significant moderation effects on shame. However, according to bootstrapping done on 5000 samples, only the moderation effect of insecure attachment to the father was significant. That is, participants who are insecurely attached to their fathers reported more shame when parents in the vignettes responded with democratic attitudes towards adolescents’ lying. A highly positive correlation between guilt and shame was observed in both studies as well, but no significant effect of gender on shame and guilt was found