The emotional state of guilt or regret is produced when individuals evaluate their behaviour as failure (or having violated some moral standard), but focus on the specific features of the self or one the self’s action that led to the failure. Unlike shame, in which the focus is on the global self, with guilt the individual focuses on the self’s actions and behaviors that are likely to repair the failure. From a phenomenological point of view, individuals are pained by their failure, but this pained feeling is directed to the cause of the failure or to the harmed object. Because the cognitive attributional process focuses on the actions of the self rather than on the totality of the self, the feeling that is produced is not as intensely negative as shame and does not lead to confusion and to the loss of action. In fact, emotion of guilt always has an associated corrective action, something that the individual can do — but does not necessarily actually do — to repair the failure. Rectification of the failure and preventing it from occurring again are the two possible corrective paths. Whereas in shame we see the body hunched over itself in an attempt to hide and disappear, in guilt we see individuals moving in space as if trying to repair the action. The postural differences that accompany shame and guilt are marked, and are helpful both in distinguishing these emotions and in measuring individual differences. Blushing is a measure also distinguishing shame from guilt; however, because of variability in the likelihood of individuals to blush, the use of blushing is not an accurate index.
See Conscience, Moral judgments, Shame