The Interpersonal Guilt Rating Scale-15: The First Validation Data About A New Clinician Report Tool For The Assessment Of Interpersonal Guilt

According to Control-Mastery Theory (CMT) guilt's origin is interpersonal, its aim is prosocial and its function is adaptive. However, guilt can be also unconscious, irrational and pathogenic, especially when generalized and repeatedly linked to shame and when it derives from pathogenic beliefs (O'Connor et al. 1997; Locke et al., 2013). Our aim is to introduce a brief clinician-report tool for the assessment of interpersonal guilt, the Interpersonal Guilt Rating Scale-15 (IGRS-15 Gazzillo, Bush, Faccini, De Luca, Mellone, 2015), and its psychometric proprieties. The item set derived from literature and from our clinical experience. We asked to 28 clinicians to assess 154 patients with: the IGRS-15; the Interpersonal Guilt Questionnaire-67 (IGQ-67; O'Connor et al. 1997); the Clinical Data Form (CDF; Westen, Shedler, 1999). An EFA on a random half of our sample (N=70) and a CFA on the other half (N=84) were performed. The extracted factors on the basis of both the scree plot procedure (point of inflexion of the curve) and factors with eigenvalue > 1 criterion are survivor guilt, separation/disloyalty guilt, omnipotent responsibility guilt and selfhate guilt. All the subscales have good internal consistency, with Alpha's values from .80 to .87. The ICC calculated on an item-per-item basis was .67, while the ICC of the scores of the four different IGRS-15 factors was .86. The test-retest reliability was acceptable with Pearson's r from .52 to .69. The assessment of guilt with the IGRS-15 show a good concordant validity with guilt assessed with IGQ-67 and we collected first data about the construct validity of our tool. This scale represent a first step in the direction of supporting the clinical judgement about interpersonal guilt with an empirically sound, easy to use, tool.