| Abstract | The emotional toll of surviving a catastrophic event or a near-death experience is often
profound, and survivors may struggle with a wide range of negative feelings. After a time of
severe danger, such as an earthquake, people may develop a unique form of guilt. When they
see the tragic end of a loved one or the deaths and losses suffered by others, survivors may
feel guilty about their own survival. Moreover, individuals may believe that they might have
managed the event differently, when in fact they had no actual influence. Since guilt is a
self-conscious affect and a moral emotion characterized by negative self-evaluation, it is
important to consider survival guilt as a separate and distinctive indicator that is to a high
extent influenced by an individual's cognitive processes and biases. Therefore, cognitively
based interventions can address guilt as such, alleviating it and potentially using it as a
starting point for personal and even societal post-traumatic growth. As a result,
understanding the cognitive features of survival guilt may help inform and create new
perspectives, not just within the existing therapies for PTSD but also in a communal response
to a collective trauma. This paper provides an overview of the existing theoretical
approaches to survivor guilt, along with somewhat scarce research results that could further
improve the cognitive approach to this phenomenon and shed more light on its potential to
encourage post-traumatic growth both in individuals and communities.
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