Affective forecasting is a process of predicting someone's emotions about future life events, and it is related to decision making and planning in everyday life. The purpose of this study was to investigate the double mediating effects of shame and gu...
Affective forecasting is a process of predicting someone's emotions about future life events, and it is related to decision making and planning in everyday life. The purpose of this study was to investigate the double mediating effects of shame and guilt in the relationship between bullying victimization experience and self’s and others’ affective forecasting of negative future events. The participants were 357 adults aged 18 to 29 years old and were asked to complete bullying experience scale and the Personal Feelings Questionnaire-2 (PFQ-2). Guilt and shame related to the self (i.e., affective forecasting) and anger and disgust of others (i.e., empathic forecasting) were measured in response to a series of vignettes that depicted negative social situations. The results of hierarchical regression analysis showed that guilt significantly explained affective forecasting, while shame significantly explained empathic forecasting. Shame and guilt were found to fully mediate the relationship between bullying victimization experience and affective forecasting as well as empathic forecasting. This study shows that excessive self-conscious emotions related to such experiences can negatively affect interpersonal interactions, not the experience of bullying victimization itself, one of the trauma experiences, suggesting the need for therapeutic intervention in self-conscious emotions that are easy for group bullying victims to experience.