When Russell Robinson visited his mother recently, she made a request: Would he please attend an important family event 75 miles away that was happening the next day, the ordination ceremony of his aunt, who was becoming a minister.
Dr. Robinson, a 44-year-old professor of mass communication who is divorced and lives in Durham, N.C., told his mother he would like to go but had made plans to spend the weekend with his 7-year-old son, who was visiting.
Dr. Robinson’s mom persisted. “Family members are expected to attend,” she said. He said he understood, but it was too late for him to change the plans with his son. She asked again. He declined again.
Then his mom turned up the heat. “Fine, don’t go,” she told him. “I understand that you have your own life—even if we are your family.”
“She was trying to make me feel bad,” says Dr. Robinson. It workedGuilt is a powerful motivator. Sometimes it is strong enough to make you do things you really don’t want to do.
A little guilt can be good for you. If you’ve engaged in bad behavior, you’ll probably benefit from feeling guilty about it. But while reasonable guilt can be good for you, misplaced guilt isn’t, experts say. And there’s a fine line between guilt, which is feeling bad about your behavior, and shame, which is feeling bad about yourself.
A study of criminals, published in the journal Psychological Science in March 2014, found those who felt guilty were less likely to break the law again than those who felt no guilt.
The researchers posed 15 hypothetical scenarios—some described guilt, some described shame—to 476 inmates in an urban jail outside Washington, D.C. The inmates were asked to rate how likely they were to respond with guilt and shame to each situation on a scale of one to five.
A year after the inmates’ release, the researchers followed up and asked the inmates about crimes they committed after their release, whether detected or undetected, and compared these reports with law-enforcement records.
The criminals who initially reported feeling guilty were less likely to have reoffended one year later.
“Guilt is a useful emotion, It pushes people to repair the harm they did,” says June P. Tangney, lead author of the study and a professor of psychology at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va. “But feelings of shame about oneself seem to motivate people more to want to hide, escape, deny or a lot of times to blame other people.”
Dr. Tangney has studied guilt for three decades and has asked thousands of people in airports and colleges, and even children in grammar school, what they feel guilty about. Over and over, the top answers are lying, cheating and stealing.
No one knows exactly how early in life we start to feel guilty, or why some are more prone to it than others, Dr. Tangney says. Research hasn’t found clear links to genetics or upbringing, she says.
Experts say toddlers as young as 15 months feel embarrassment, and by 2 years start to feel shame.
By fifth grade, children have pretty well-defined tendencies to feel guilt and shame, Dr. Tangney says.
It can be hard to tell if someone is feeling guilty, because there isn’t a typical facial expression or posture associated with it, the way standing with head down and shoulders slumped is associated with shame.
Dr. Tangney’s research has dispelled some deeply held beliefs. First, it is a myth that our parents make us feel guilt-prone, either because they are manipulative or guilt-prone themselves.
In a study of children, parents and grandparents and their propensity to feel guilt and shame, Dr. Tangney found the average correlation between parents and children was very low.
Interestingly, she found a higher correlation between fathers and sons than between mothers and daughters, mothers and sons and fathers and daughters.
There’s no link between guilt feelings and particular religious backgrounds, Dr. Tangney says. Her years of study show Protestants, Muslims, atheists and everyone else feel, on average, just as guilty or shameful as Catholics and Jews.
Women report feeling more guilt and shame than men, she says. But women generally report feeling more emotions than men, both positive and negative, with the exception of anger.
“We don’t know if women actually feel more guilty than men, or are more attuned to their feelings, or are more comfortable acknowledging them,” Dr. Tangney says.
Both men and women who are more prone to feeling guilty also are more empathic, she says.
Susan Krauss Whitbourne, professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has identified five types of guilt and says only one is good—guilt about something you did.
The other four types of guilt are unproductive, she says. These include guilt about something you didn’t do but wanted to (perhaps you had a dream about a friend’s spouse one night), and guilt about something you only think you did (you wish your noisy co-worker would be quiet, and then she gets sick and has to take time off).
There is guilt about not doing enough to help someone else (family caregivers often feel this) and guilt about being better off than someone else (this is survivor guilt).
How can you tell if the guilt you are feeling is good or bad?
First, ask whether what you feel is rational. Is guilt a knee-jerk reaction for you? Is someone trying to make you feel guilty when you haven’t done anything wrong? Or have you actually done something inconsistent with your values? Did you hurt someone?
If you have done something wrong, then it’s time to change. Consider apologizing. Even if you can’t go back and fix what you did, alter your behavior in the future.
The goal is to be rational about an emotion that is often quite irrational.
“Guilt is something you can control, whether you need to tune it up or tune it down,” Dr. Whitbourne says.
A few hours after he spoke with his mother about the ordination ceremony, Dr. Robinson got a text from another family member about the event. Then his mother called again.
She says it wasn’t her intention to produce guilt. “I just wanted him to understand that family comes first,” says Joyce Russell Robinson, a professor of women’s literature who lives in Raleigh, N.C. “If guilt happens to be a byproduct of his accepting responsibility, I can’t help that.”
Finally a third family member called and said, “Russ, if you can do mud runs with strangers, the least you can do is come out and support your family.”
Dr. Robinson thought about all the things his family had done for him, from assisting him financially while he worked on his Ph.D, to helping him raise his son.
He texted them all back. He reminded them of the things he’d done for them. And then said he would be at the ordination the next day. “I thought: ‘This is my family and they have a point,’” he says.
—Email Elizabeth Bernstein at elizabeth.bernstein@wsj.com or follow her on Facebook or Twitter at EbernsteinWSJ.