Relationships of Length of Punishment with Type of Punishment and Development of Guilt Responsivity Page: 3

                                
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significantly influence the development of guilt have been
investigated or identified.
4,,V,r The present study attempts to measure the length of
,r '5
punishment and investigate its relationship with the develop-
ment of the guilt response. This previously unexplored hy-
pothesized dimension of punishment should not be viewed as
how many times the parent strikes or verbally scolds the child
upon transgression, but rather how long the child perceives
the parent as maintaining an angry punitive attitude after
the child's misdeed.
Previous studies in this area have implicitly assumed,
and on occasion explicitly stated, that physical types of
punishment are short term; whereas, psychological types of
punishment are long term. The following example is presented:
It seems plausible that psychological discipline
may become even more "painful" to S than corporal
methods once he learns to respond to it, in that,
if the.parent slaps him, the'punishment is over;
but the mother's not talking to him for half an
hour lasts longer (3  P- 706).
Although this assumption might be essentially correct in
many cases, there is no empirical evidence supporting the
assumption. It is possible that the parent who uses cor-
poral punishment does not forgive upon termination of the
physical punishment, and the end of physical punishment may,
in fact, mark the beginning of a type of psychological
punishment.
•{Put more simply, parental punishment techniques, re-
gardless of type, involve some amount of overt dissatisfaction