Identifying the Emotions Behind Apologies for Severe Transgressions

Interpersonal transgressions, subsequent apologies, and offered (or withheld) forgiveness hold important consequences for both perpetrators and victims. Research has focused largely on the perceptions of victims and processes that promote forgiveness in relation to transgressions of low severity. In order to extend this domain of inquiry we examined the emotional substrates that facilitate and constrain apologies for severe transgressions (i.e., murder). We collected data on the final statements from incarcerated persons on death row and applied a sentiment analysis to obtain estimates of the emotions expressed in them (i.e., anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, and trust). We manually coded each statement to indicate whether it exhibited some form of apology and compared the emotions expressed in apologetic statements versus non-apologetic statements. Results indicated that overall, final statements reflected high levels of joy and trust. Similar to studies of less severe transgressions, we found that 34.40% of statements contained some form of apology. Our comparative analyses revealed that apologetic statements reflected significantly greater sadness and less anger. In regression and subsequent dominance analyses we found that sadness and anger were the most important emotions to apologizing. We also found that anger moderated the association between sadness and the likelihood of apologizing such that as anger increased the effect of sadness decreased. Taken together these findings suggest that apologies for severe transgressions involve a delicate balance between sadness and anger rather than either emotion in isolation.