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A confession is a statement - made by a person or by a group of persons - acknowledging some personal fact that the person (or the group) would ostensibly prefer to keep hidden. The term presumes that the speaker is providing information that he believes the other party is not already aware of,〔Roger W. Shuy, ''The Language of Confession, Interrogation, and Deception'' (1998), p. 2-10.〕 and is frequently associated with an admission of a moral or legal wrong: Not all confessions reveal wrongdoing, however. For example, a confession of love is often considered positive both by the confessor and by the recipient of the confession, and is a common theme in literature.〔Giulio Marra, ''Shakespeare and this "imperfect" World: Dramatic Form and the Nature of Knowing'' (1997), p. 69, describing "the distinction between "to do" and "to confess", between having thoughts of love and confessing one's love, between the indetermination of a feeling and its final definition", as a theme that "creeps into the various stories".〕〔Charles Emil Kany, ''The Beginnings of the Epistolary Novel in France, Italy and Spain'' (1937), Volume 21, Issues 1-6, p. 19.〕 With respect to confessions of wrongdoing, there are several specific kinds of confessions that have significance beyond the social. A legal confession involves an admission of some wrongdoing that has legal consequence, while the concept of confession in religion varies widely across various belief systems, and is usually more akin to a ritual by which the person acknowledges thoughts or actions considered sinful or morally wrong within the confines of the confessor's religion. In some religions, confession takes the form of an oral communication to another person. Socially, however, the term may refer to admissions that are neither legally nor religiously significant.〔 == Psychology == Confession often benefits the confessor. Paul Wilkes characterizes confession as "a pillar of mental health" because of its ability to relieve anxieties associated with keeping secrets.〔 〕 Confessors are more likely to confess when the expected benefits outweigh the marginal costs (when the benefit of the offense to them is high, the cost to the victim is low, and the probability of information leakage is high).〔 〕 People may undertake social confessions in order to relieve feelings of guilt or to seek forgiveness from a wronged party, but such confessions may also serve to create social bonds between the confessor and the person to whom they are speaking, and may prompt the listener to reply with confessions of their own.〔 A person may therefore confess wrongdoing to another person as a means of creating such a social bond, or of extracting reciprocal information from the other person.〔 A confession may even be made in a self-aggrandizing manner, as a way for the confessor to claim credit for a misdeed for the purpose of eliciting a reaction to that claim.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Confession」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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