Some limitations of this meta-analysis should be mentioned. First, this meta-analysis
is based on studies that were not explicitly designed to examine the relation between
moral development and recidivism, which mitigate the power to detect moderating
effects. Important moderators that could not be tested were the initial offense that led
to the first officially registered conviction and the type of recidivism that was reported
(e.g., violent offenses, petty crime or sexual offenses). Furthermore, because of the
small number of studies reporting on the relation between guilt, shame, and recidivism,
we were not able to conduct separate moderator analyses for these individual moral
emotion constructs