The guilt that a person feels for surviving a traumatic experience when another did not, known as survivor’s guilt, has been an obstacle to the cognitivist theory of emotions. This kind of guilt, some say, is a recalcitrant emotion, an emotion that appears even when the person has a belief in tension with it (A common example is where someone is afraid of flying despite believing that it poses no danger). In this thesis we propose a way for explaining this phenomenon that does not conflict with the cognitivist theory of emotions. We argue that survivor’s guilt appears because the person develops a motivational biased judgment of responsibility.
