Does Guilt Help or Hinder Gratitude? Personal Distress, Guilt Proneness, and Gender Differences in Adolescents

Background: Adolescents are at an increased risk for experiencing emotional reactions and interpersonal stressors, which can interfere with their access to gratitude. While gratitude is typically defined as an empathic or other-oriented emotion, personal distress is an aversive or self-oriented empathic reaction to others’ emotions or states, which can interfere with prosocial behavior. The goal of this study was to examine whether guilt proneness and gender moderate the prospective association between personal distress and later gratitude. Methods: The participants consisted of 111 early adolescents (61% females; M age = 12.74). Trait gratitude, personal distress (IRI—Personal Distress), and guilt proneness (TOSCA-A) were used as self-report measures. Using conditional process analysis (PROCESS Model 2), we tested whether Time 1 personal distress is associated with Time 2 gratitude, moderated by guilt and gender. Correlations showed that Time 2 gratitude was positively related to guilt but was not significantly related to personal distress. Results: The results indicated that personal distress was associated with lower Time 2 gratitude when guilt proneness was moderate to high, but not when guilt proneness was low. The association between personal distress and gratitude varied across levels of guilt proneness. Although conditional effects were examined separately for boys and girls, the interaction with gender was not significant and should be interpreted cautiously. The findings suggest that lower gratitude in adolescence may reflect distress–guilt dynamics rather than ingratitude itself. Conclusions: These findings highlight the importance of considering guilt proneness in future research on adolescents’ socioemotional development.