Shame

Abstract

Shame, which MeSH classifies under guilt, is the painful self-conscious emotion that follows a negative evaluation of the whole self, typically accompanied by a wish to hide or withdraw. This article covers how shame is defined and distinguished from guilt and embarrassment, the evolutionary account of shame as a system that tracks devaluation by others, its spontaneous nonverbal expression and its appearance in three-year-olds, its cortisol and brain correlates, its measurement, and its strong associations with depression and anxiety together with a compassion-focused treatment. The central dispute is whether shame is inherently maladaptive or a functional social gauge that turns problematic when failure seems irreparable. Three interactive demos show the match between anticipated shame and audience devaluation, the conditions under which shame leads to approach rather than withdrawal, and the social-evaluative threat that drives the cortisol response.

Keywords: shame, self-conscious emotions, guilt, social devaluation

Shame research has been divided. The shame literature can be broadly dichotomised into whether it argues for a problematic or a functional view of shame: shame is commonly linked to aggression, poor health and wellbeing, and psychopathologies such as post-traumatic stress disorder, eating disorders and depression, while some researchers suggest that shame is functional because it serves the purpose of gauging when one's social self is threatened by a loss of status or social bonds (Cibich et al., 2016). The two readings are not simply incompatible. The same review argues that avoidance in response to shame can move it from a functional social gauge that motivates repair to a problematic emotion, and that avoidance is more likely the more irreparable the shame seems (Cibich et al., 2016). Much of what follows is an account of how one emotion can carry both reputations.

What Shame Is

Shame is one of a triad of negatively valenced self-conscious emotions, with guilt and embarrassment, within which research on moral emotions has long remained focused on shame and guilt (Tangney et al., 2007). Its defining feature, in the account that has organised the field, is its object. The distinction between shame and guilt as focus on self versus behaviour, first proposed by Helen Block Lewis, holds that shame involves a negative evaluation of the global self whereas guilt involves a negative evaluation of a specific behaviour (Tangney et al., 2007). The operational form of this distinction appears in the Guilt and Shame Proneness scale, whose two shame subscales assess negative self-evaluations and withdrawal action tendencies following publicly exposed transgressions, and whose two guilt subscales assess negative behaviour-evaluations and repair action tendencies following private transgressions (Cohen et al., 2011).

A second account defines shame by what it is for. One evolutionary proposal suggests that humans have innate needs to be seen as attractive to others, that these needs form the basis for shame and mediate evaluations of social standing, social acceptance and social bonds, and that shame and humiliation are associated with attacks on, and losses of, social attractiveness (Gilbert, 1997). On this view the internal experiences of shame are derived from submissive strategies in which one seeks to signal to others an awareness of lost social standing and to limit possible damage (Gilbert, 1997). A more recent proposal makes the functional claim testable: shame, although unpleasant like pain, is hypothesised to serve the adaptive function of defending against the social devaluation that results when negative information reaches others, for example by deterring actions that would lead to more devaluation than benefits (Sznycer et al., 2016). The two definitions, by object and by function, are not rivals so much as answers to different questions, and the body of this article treats them in turn.

Shame, Guilt and Embarrassment

Whether the three self-conscious emotions are really distinct was tested empirically in the 1990s. When 182 undergraduates described personal embarrassment, shame and guilt experiences and rated them on structural and phenomenological dimensions, the ratings clearly demonstrated that shame, guilt and embarrassment are not merely different terms for the same affective experience; embarrassment was a relatively distant neighbour of shame and guilt, and the differences among the three could not be explained simply by intensity of affect or by degree of moral transgression (Tangney et al., 1996). The same study contradicted a folk belief: shame was no more likely than guilt to be experienced in public situations, since all three emotions typically occurred in social contexts but a significant proportion of shame and guilt events occurred when respondents were alone (Tangney et al., 1996).

Figure 1

Two Accounts of Shame

The distinction has consequences. In the validation of the Guilt and Shame Proneness scale, both guilt subscales were negatively correlated with unethical decision making, whereas the two shame subscales were only weakly correlated with one another and their relationships with unethical decision making diverged: shame as negative self-evaluation constrained unethical decision making, but shame as withdrawal did not (Cohen et al., 2011). In a longitudinal study of 476 jail inmates, guilt proneness negatively and directly predicted reoffence in the first year after release, shame proneness did not, and mediational modelling showed that shame proneness positively predicted recidivism via its robust link to externalisation of blame; unimpeded by that defensive externalisation, shame showed a direct inhibitory effect, driven primarily by items assessing a motivation to hide, so that the pain of shame may have two faces, one with destructive and the other with constructive potential (Tangney et al., 2014). Guilt increased cooperation among proselfs in a social dilemma game and an everyday cooperation measure; shame produced no such effect (de Hooge et al., 2007).

The self-versus-behaviour account has critics. One reconsideration argues that some of the current distinctions between shame and guilt need to be redrawn, proposing instead the kind of self-evaluation involved, inadequacy versus harmfulness; the focus on the perceived discrepancy between actual and ideal self versus the focus on perceived responsibility for one's fault; and consequently the different domains of self-esteem involved (Miceli & Castelfranchi, 2018). Another decomposes the shame concept itself: a conceptual model of concern for self-image and social image distinguishes the appraisals of self-defect and other-condemnation and the feelings of rejection, inferiority and shame embedded in the shame concept, such that concern for a damaged social image is represented by an other-condemnation to rejection combination, concern for a damaged self-image by a global self-defect to inferiority combination, and a specific, repairable self-defect to shame combination is linked with self-improvement motivation (Gausel & Leach, 2011). On this model, what is usually called shame is several appraisal-feeling combinations, only one of which is self-improving.

Types of Shame

The Medical Subject Headings thesaurus files shame under its parent descriptor Guilt (tree F01.470.483) and gives it one direct subtype, listed in Table 1. Both placements are indexing artefacts rather than theoretical claims: MeSH is an indexing classification for the biomedical literature, not a taxonomy of the mind, and the psychological literature reviewed above treats shame, guilt and embarrassment as three distinct emotions, with embarrassment the most distant of the three. Subtypes in MeSH need not be mutually exclusive, and a paper may be indexed under more than one term.

The research literature partitions shame differently, by what is evaluated and by whom. The depressive-symptom meta-analysis distinguished external shame, which involves negative views of the self as seen through the eyes of others, from internal shame, which involves negative views of the self as seen through one's own eyes, and found larger effect sizes for external shame (r = .56) than internal shame (r = .42) (Kim et al., 2011). The anxiety meta-analysis found that external shame, perceived negative evaluations of others, seems to be more strongly associated with social anxiety symptoms than internal shame, negative self-evaluations (Cândea & Szentagotai-Tătar, 2018). The Experience of Shame Scale adds a third cut, assessing specific areas of shame related to self and performance, as distinct from the general shame assessed by scenario-based measures such as the Test of Self-Conscious Affect (Andrews et al., 2002; Tangney et al., 2007).

The Function of Shame

The functional account has been tested directly. Prominent theories of shame hold that shame is inherently maladaptive, but direct tests of the fit between shame and its probable target domain had not previously been conducted; if shame defends against social devaluation, the intensity of shame people feel regarding a given item of negative information should track the devaluation that would happen if that item became known, and the data indicate a close match between shame intensities and audience devaluation, which suggests that shame is an adaptation (Sznycer et al., 2016). The finding generalises to small-scale societies. In 15 traditional small-scale societies there was an extraordinarily close correspondence between the intensity of shame felt if one exhibited specific acts or traits and the magnitude of devaluation expressed in response to those acts or traits by local audiences, and even by foreign audiences; geographic proximity, linguistic similarity and religious similarity all failed to account for the strength of the between-community correlations, which the authors take as evidence that shame is a universal system, part of the species' cooperative biology, rather than a product of cultural evolution (Sznycer et al., 2018). Universality of the mechanism does not mean uniformity of the emotion. Three studies in Bengkulu, Indonesia, and California found that shame is more prominent in Bengkulu, a collectivistic culture, than in California, an individualistic one, that shame is associated with guilt-like accounts in California but not in Bengkulu and with subordinance events in Bengkulu but not in California, and that the available data are consistent with the proposition that shame evolved from a rank-related emotion (Fessler, 2004). The cross-cultural case for shame as an adaptation and the cross-cultural evidence of variation in how it is elicited and valued are, on this reading, two parts of one account.

If shame is a gauge of devaluation, what it motivates should depend on whether the damage can be undone. Shame has been found to promote both approach and withdrawal behaviours, and shame theories had not been able to explain how it can promote such contrasting behaviours; across five studies with different shame inductions and different dependent measures, shame activated approach behaviours to restore the threatened self and, in situations where this was not possible or too risky, withdrawal behaviours to protect the self from further damage, so that different behavioural responses to shame can be understood in terms of restore and protect motives (de Hooge et al., 2010). A theory-driven meta-analysis of 90 samples with 12,364 participants reached the same conclusion at scale: shame had a positive link to constructive approach when failure (g = .47) or social image (g = .37) was more reparable, and a negative link to constructive approach when failure was less reparable (g = -.34); a supplemental meta-analysis of 42 samples showed shame and guilt to have a similar positive link to constructive approach when failure was more reparable (g = .44 and .43), but not when it was less reparable (g = -.08 and .27) (Leach & Cidam, 2015).

The reparability result is the hinge between the two literatures with which this article opened. Shame as an emotion that evolved for a functional purpose can become problematic when avoidance replaces repair, avoidance is more likely to the extent that shame seems irreparable, and how people see themselves, others, their actions and the costs of repair are all likely to affect whether shame becomes functional or problematic (Cibich et al., 2016). The dispositional evidence fits. Across studies employing zero-order correlations, dispositional shame was negatively correlated with pro-social orientation (k = 47, mean r = -.05) where dispositional guilt was positively correlated (k = 63, mean r = .13), and semi-partial correlations, which remove the variance the two share, strengthened both effects (Tignor & Colvin, 2017). Dispositional shame was at most weakly and negatively related to pro-social orientation; episodic shame about a reparable failure was linked to constructive approach.

Expression and Development

Shame has a face and a posture. A study of whether the recognisable nonverbal expressions associated with pride and shame are biologically innate tested whether sighted, blind and congenitally blind individuals across cultures spontaneously display pride and shame behaviours in response to the same success and failure situations, victory and defeat at the Olympic or Paralympic Games; sighted, blind and congenitally blind individuals from more than 30 nations displayed the prototypical pride expression after success, and individuals from most cultures also displayed behaviours associated with shame after failure (Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008). Culture moderated the shame response among sighted athletes, which was less pronounced among individuals from highly individualistic, self-expression-valuing cultures, primarily in North America and West Eurasia; because congenitally blind individuals across cultures showed the shame response to failure, the authors conclude that the expressions of both shame and pride are likely to be innate but that the shame display may be intentionally inhibited by some sighted individuals in accordance with cultural norms (Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008). The expression is now a standard stimulus: a Facial Action Coding System-verified set of emotion expressions was developed that is the first such set to include the three self-conscious emotions known to have recognisable expressions, embarrassment, pride and shame, alongside the six established basic emotions, all posed by the same four expressers (Tracy et al., 2009).

Shame also appears early. When three-year-old children were presented with easy and difficult tasks and their emotional responses observed, no shame was shown when they succeeded and no pride when they failed; significantly more shame was shown when they failed easy tasks than when they failed difficult tasks, and significantly more pride when they succeeded on difficult than on easy tasks (Lewis et al., 1992). While there were no sex differences in task failures, girls showed more shame than boys, with no sex difference in pride on success (Lewis et al., 1992). The pattern is what an appraisal account predicts: shame is not a response to failure as such but to failure that reflects on the self, which failing an easy task does and failing a hard one does not. The theoretical model of self-conscious emotions that formalises this sets out the features that distinguish self-conscious from basic emotions, explains why generally accepted models of basic emotions do not adequately capture the self-conscious emotion process, and derives a set of predictions from the model, which a later review describes as an appraisal-based model of self-conscious emotions (Tracy & Robins, 2004; Tangney et al., 2007).

The Biology of Shame

Shame has a physiology. A programme of research that treats shame as a key emotional response to social self threats, that is to social evaluation or rejection, proposes that shame may orchestrate specific patterns of psychobiological change under these conditions; a series of studies demonstrates that acute threats to the social self increase proinflammatory cytokine activity and cortisol and that these changes occur in concert with shame, while general or composite affective states such as distress are unrelated to these physiological and health outcomes (Dickerson et al., 2004). The same group's meta-analysis measured the cortisol side of that claim without naming the emotion. A meta-analysis of 208 laboratory studies of acute psychological stressors tested a model of the conditions capable of eliciting cortisol responses: psychological stressors increased cortisol levels but effects varied widely across tasks, and motivated performance tasks elicited cortisol responses if they were uncontrollable or characterised by social-evaluative threat, meaning that task performance could be negatively judged by others (Dickerson & Kemeny, 2004). Tasks containing both uncontrollable and social-evaluative elements were associated with the largest cortisol and adrenocorticotropin hormone changes and the longest times to recovery, findings consistent with the animal literature on the physiological effects of uncontrollable social threat and contradicting the belief that cortisol is responsive to all types of stressors (Dickerson & Kemeny, 2004). Social-evaluative threat is the situational core of shame, and the cortisol response to it is the endocrine evidence most directly relevant to shame, although the meta-analysis measured responses to laboratory stressors rather than shame itself.

The imaging literature is small. In a pilot study that adapted an earlier Japanese fMRI paradigm, using shame- and guilt-related and neutral stimuli, to a healthy German sample of 14 participants, activations were found for shame in the anterior cingulate cortex and parahippocampal gyrus and for guilt in the fusiform and middle temporal gyri, with specific activations for shame in the medial and inferior frontal gyri and for guilt in the amygdala and insula; the authors conclude that shame and guilt share some neural networks while having individual areas of activation, and that frontal, temporal and limbic areas play a prominent role in the generation of moral feelings (Michl et al., 2014). A systematic review of 21 functional and structural imaging studies of shame, embarrassment and guilt found that, although studies differed considerably in methodology, shame was more likely to be associated with activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and sensorimotor cortex, embarrassment with the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and amygdala, and guilt with the ventral anterior cingulate cortex, posterior temporal regions and the precuneus; the results point to some common and some distinct neural underpinnings, and further research is required to replicate the findings (Bastin et al., 2016).

Table 2. Biological findings on shame, as reported in the cited abstracts.

Note. Each row lists only the result named in that paper's abstract for the shame condition or for social-evaluative threat (Dickerson & Kemeny, 2004; Michl et al., 2014; Bastin et al., 2016; Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008). Designs differ, so the rows are not directly comparable.

Shame in Psychopathology

Of the self-conscious emotions, shame carries the clinical weight. Across 242 effect sizes from 108 studies employing 22,411 participants, shame showed significantly stronger associations with depressive symptoms (r = .43) than guilt (r = .28), external shame was associated with larger effect sizes than internal shame, and the authors conclude that although the correlational data are ambiguous with respect to causal interpretation, shame should figure more prominently in understandings of the emotional underpinnings of depressive symptoms (Kim et al., 2011). In the meta-analysis of anxiety symptoms, shame was in most cases more strongly associated with anxiety symptoms, with in general medium effect sizes, than guilt, with in general small effect sizes, and when the shared variance of shame and guilt was controlled, in most cases only shame remained significantly associated with anxiety symptoms (Cândea & Szentagotai-Tătar, 2018). The link to depression and anxiety is therefore stronger for shame than for guilt as usually measured, although both meta-analyses found two maladaptive variants of guilt, generalized guilt and contextual-maladaptive guilt, to be associated with symptoms as strongly as shame.

Measurement matters here as much as in the guilt literature. In a longitudinal questionnaire study of 163 university students, the Experience of Shame Scale, based on a previous interview measure, and an established shame scale, the scenario-based Test of Self-Conscious Affect (Tangney et al., 2007), were considered in relation to depressive symptoms at two time points 11 weeks apart; both scales made significant independent contributions at time 1, but only the Experience of Shame Scale predicted additional significant variance in time 2 symptoms when time 1 symptoms were controlled (Andrews et al., 2002). The authors attribute the difference to the Experience of Shame Scale assessing specific areas of shame related to self and performance, whereas the scenario measure assesses general shame and may therefore be more prone to mood-state effects (Andrews et al., 2002). Shame has also been proposed as a determinant of physical health: emotional states, in particular shame, can have a significant impact on health, illness and health-related behaviours through four possible processes, acute shame avoidance behaviour, chronic shame health-related behaviours, stigma and social status threat, and biological mechanisms, and the authors argue that its impact is sufficiently powerful for it to be considered an affective determinant of health (Dolezal & Lyons, 2017).

Treatment has followed the evolutionary account. Compassionate mind training was developed for people with high shame and self-criticism, whose problems tend to be chronic and who find self-warmth and self-acceptance difficult or frightening, on a theory that distinguishes activating from soothing affect systems (Gilbert & Procter, 2006). In an uncontrolled pilot, six patients attending a cognitive-behavioural day centre for chronic difficulties completed 12 two-hour sessions, and results showed significant reductions in depression, anxiety, self-criticism, shame, inferiority and submissive behaviour, with a significant increase in the ability to be self-soothing and to focus on feelings of warmth and reassurance for the self (Gilbert & Procter, 2006). The approach, which grew into compassion focused therapy and shares its aim with self-compassion interventions, treats shame not as a cognition to be disputed but as a submissive strategy to be met with a different affect system; the pilot's sample size means that its results are a proof of concept rather than evidence of efficacy.

Worked Example

The numbers in this literature repay conversion. The depressive-symptom meta-analysis reports r = .43 for shame and r = .28 for guilt (Kim et al., 2011); squaring them gives shared variance of 0.185 and 0.078, so shame shares about 18% of its variance with depressive symptoms against guilt's 8%, more than twice as much. External shame at r = .56 shares 31%, internal shame at r = .42 shares 18%. The approach meta-analysis reports Hedges' g of .47 for shame and constructive approach when failure was more reparable and -.34 when it was less reparable (Leach & Cidam, 2015); the difference, 0.81 standard deviations, is the size of the swing that reparability produces in what shame motivates, and the two values lie on opposite sides of zero, which is why a literature that ignored reparability could find both results.

The expression study drew on athletes from more than 30 nations (Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008), the cross-cultural shame study on 15 small-scale societies (Sznycer et al., 2018), the cortisol meta-analysis on 208 laboratory studies (Dickerson & Kemeny, 2004) and the approach meta-analysis on 90 samples totalling 12,364 participants (Leach & Cidam, 2015), an average of about 137 participants per sample. Against those, the imaging pilot had 14 participants (Michl et al., 2014) and the treatment pilot six (Gilbert & Procter, 2006). The evidence for what shame is and does is therefore an order of magnitude larger than the evidence for where it sits in the brain or how to treat it, and the systematic review's call for replication should be read with the 14 in mind (Bastin et al., 2016).

Discussion

Three lessons follow for cognitive psychology. First, the maladaptive reputation of shame rests on a confound between the emotion and the appraisal of reparability. Shame activated approach to restore the self when restoration was possible and withdrawal to protect it when it was not (de Hooge et al., 2010); meta-analytically, its link to constructive approach reversed sign between reparable and irreparable failure (Leach & Cidam, 2015); and the review that set out to integrate the two literatures locates the turn from functional to problematic shame in avoidance, which is more likely the more irreparable the shame seems (Cibich et al., 2016). What makes shame dangerous is not the emotion but the judgement that nothing can be done.

Second, the functional account has passed a test the maladaptive account never set. The intensity of anticipated shame matched audience devaluation item by item (Sznycer et al., 2016) and did so in 15 small-scale societies whose geographic, linguistic and religious similarity did not explain the pattern (Sznycer et al., 2018); the shame display appeared after defeat in congenitally blind athletes who could never have learned it by observation (Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008); and the endocrine response that tracks social-evaluative threat is consistent with the animal literature on uncontrollable social threat (Dickerson & Kemeny, 2004). The social-attractiveness account of shame as a submissive strategy (Gilbert, 1997) and the devaluation-tracking account are two statements of one idea, and both predict that the emotion should be universal and early; it is present by age three (Lewis et al., 1992).

Third, the clinical findings are findings about shame more than about guilt as usually measured, and about how shame is measured. In most cases only shame remained associated with anxiety symptoms once its shared variance with guilt was removed (Cândea & Szentagotai-Tătar, 2018); external shame outweighed internal shame for depressive symptoms and for social anxiety symptoms (Kim et al., 2011; Cândea & Szentagotai-Tătar, 2018); and a scale that asks about specific areas of shame predicted later depressive symptoms where a general scenario scale did not (Andrews et al., 2002). The decomposition of the shame concept into appraisal-feeling combinations (Gausel & Leach, 2011) suggests why: the instruments that predict pathology may be measuring rejection and inferiority, while the instruments that predict repair are measuring a specific and repairable self-defect.

Current Directions

The research front runs in four directions. In evolutionary psychology, the devaluation-tracking programme treats shame as a universal system and part of the species' cooperative biology rather than a product of cultural evolution (Sznycer et al., 2018). In social psychology, the reparability moderator is being written into theory: the integrative review proposes that understanding what factors affect perceived reparability will be important for understanding how shame becomes problematic (Cibich et al., 2016), and the conceptual model of self-image and social image separates the appraisals and feelings that the single word shame has been made to carry (Gausel & Leach, 2011). In health research, a proposed research agenda aims to extend knowledge of health-related shame as an affective determinant of health (Dolezal & Lyons, 2017). And in clinical psychology, compassionate mind training is offered as a useful addition for some patients with chronic difficulties, especially those from traumatic backgrounds who may lack a sense of inner warmth or the ability to be self-soothing (Gilbert & Procter, 2006), while the measurement literature presses the point that general and specific shame scales do not predict the same outcomes (Andrews et al., 2002). The imaging literature, by its own account, awaits replication (Bastin et al., 2016).

Common Misconceptions

“Shame is just a stronger form of guilt.”

Phenomenological ratings showed that shame, guilt and embarrassment are not merely different terms for the same affective experience, and that the differences among them could not be explained simply by intensity of affect or by degree of moral transgression (Tangney et al., 1996).

“Shame is always maladaptive.”

Shame had a positive link to constructive approach when failure or social image was more reparable and a negative link when failure was less reparable (Leach & Cidam, 2015), and the intensity of anticipated shame closely matched the devaluation an audience would express, which suggests that shame is an adaptation (Sznycer et al., 2016).

“Shame is a cultural product, learned differently in each society.”

The shame-devaluation link held across 15 traditional small-scale societies and was not explained by geographic proximity, linguistic similarity or religious similarity (Sznycer et al., 2018), and congenitally blind athletes across cultures showed the shame display after failure (Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008). What does vary is prominence and content: shame was more prominent in Bengkulu, a collectivistic culture, than in California, an individualistic one, and was associated with guilt-like accounts in California but with subordinance events in Bengkulu (Fessler, 2004).

“Shame is only felt when others are watching.”

Shame was no more likely than guilt to be experienced in public situations, and a significant proportion of shame events occurred when respondents were alone (Tangney et al., 1996); what distinguishes external from internal shame is whose eyes the self is seen through, not whether anyone is present (Kim et al., 2011).

Glossary

Compassionate mind training.

A group therapy approach developed for people with high shame and self-criticism that cultivates a soothing affect system and the ability to be self-warm and self-soothing.

Constructive approach.

Prosocial or self-improving responses to failure; shame is linked to them positively when failure is reparable and negatively when it is not.

Devaluation.

The lowering of a person's value in the eyes of others when negative information about them becomes known; the quantity that anticipated shame closely tracks.

Embarrassment.

The third negatively valenced self-conscious emotion and MeSH's one subtype of shame; a relatively distant neighbour of shame and guilt in phenomenological ratings.

Experience of Shame Scale.

A questionnaire assessing specific areas of shame related to self and performance, which predicted later depressive symptoms where a general scenario scale did not.

External shame.

Negative views of the self as seen through the eyes of others; more strongly associated with depressive and social anxiety symptoms than internal shame.

Externalisation of blame.

The defensive attribution of fault to others, through which shame proneness predicted recidivism.

Guilt.

The self-conscious emotion that follows a negative evaluation of a specific behaviour and motivates repair; MeSH's parent descriptor for shame.

Humiliation.

An emotion that, like shame, follows a loss of social attractiveness, but in which the focus is on the harm done by others rather than on the self.

Internal shame.

Negative views of the self as seen through one's own eyes.

Reparability.

The appraisal that a failure or a damaged social image can be put right; the moderator that decides whether shame motivates approach or withdrawal.

Restore and protect motives.

The two motives through which shame produces approach to restore the threatened self or, when that is impossible or too risky, withdrawal to protect it.

Self-conscious emotions.

Emotions such as shame, guilt, embarrassment and pride that require a representation of the self; the three negative ones form the triad within which moral-emotion research has remained focused on shame and guilt.

Shame display.

The recognisable nonverbal expression of shame, shown after defeat by sighted, blind and congenitally blind athletes from most cultures.

Shame-proneness.

The dispositional tendency to experience shame across transgressions; strongly related to psychological maladjustment and, via externalisation of blame, to recidivism.

Social attractiveness.

In the evolutionary account, the quality humans have an innate need to be seen as having; attacks on it and losses of it are the occasions of shame and humiliation.

Social-evaluative threat.

The condition in which task performance could be negatively judged by others; with uncontrollability, the condition that produces the largest cortisol responses.

Submissive strategy.

In the social-attractiveness account, the behavioural strategy from which the internal experience of shame derives, signalling awareness of lost standing and limiting damage.

Key Researchers

Paul Gilbert

. Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Derby and founder of compassion focused therapy; placed shame in an evolutionary account of social rank and social attractiveness and developed compassionate mind training for people with high shame and self-criticism. Wikipedia

Ilona E. de Hooge

. Professor and Chair of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour at Wageningen University and Research; showed that shame carries both restore and protect motivations and that guilt, but not shame, increases cooperation in social dilemmas. ORCID - Faculty Page

Colin Wayne Leach

. Professor of Psychology and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University; reconceptualised shame around concern for self-image and social image and showed meta-analytically when shame is linked to constructive approach rather than withdrawal. Faculty Page

Helen Block Lewis

(1913-1987). Psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist who taught at Yale University; drew the modern distinction between shame as a global negative evaluation of the self and guilt as a negative evaluation of a specific behaviour, and placed unacknowledged shame at the centre of neurosis. Wikipedia

Michael Lewis

. University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, where he directed the Institute for the Study of Child Development; developmental theorist of shame as a self-conscious emotion who showed that three-year-olds display shame after failing easy tasks and pride after succeeding on difficult ones. Wikipedia - Faculty Page

Daniel Sznycer

. Faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Oklahoma State University and its Oklahoma Center for Evolutionary Analysis; developed the information-threat theory of shame and showed across cultures that anticipated shame closely tracks the degree to which others would devalue the person. ORCID - Faculty Page

June Price Tangney

. Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at George Mason University, retired in 2025; established the empirical distinction between shame-proneness and guilt-proneness with the Test of Self-Conscious Affect and showed that shame, not guilt, carries most of the association with psychopathology and predicts recidivism through externalisation of blame. Faculty Page

Jessica L. Tracy

. Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia and director of the Emotion and Self Lab; identified the spontaneous nonverbal expression of shame in sighted, blind and congenitally blind athletes and co-authored the appraisal model of self-conscious emotions. Faculty Page

Frequently Asked Questions

What is shame in psychology?

Shame is a negatively valenced self-conscious emotion that, in the dominant account, involves a negative evaluation of the global self rather than of a specific behaviour (Tangney et al., 2007); its shame-proneness subscales assess negative self-evaluations and withdrawal action tendencies (Cohen et al., 2011).

What is the difference between shame and guilt?

Shame involves a negative evaluation of the whole self and a tendency to withdraw, guilt a negative evaluation of a specific behaviour and a tendency to repair (Tangney et al., 2007; Cohen et al., 2011); the two are not merely different terms for the same affective experience (Tangney et al., 1996).

Is shame ever useful?

Yes, when the failure can be repaired: shame had a positive link to constructive approach when failure or social image was more reparable and a negative link when failure was less reparable (Leach & Cidam, 2015), and shame activates approach to restore the threatened self when restoration is possible (de Hooge et al., 2010).

Why do humans feel shame at all?

On the functional account, shame defends against the social devaluation that results when negative information reaches others, and the intensity of shame people feel about an act closely matches how much an audience would devalue them for it (Sznycer et al., 2016), a match that held across 15 small-scale societies (Sznycer et al., 2018).

Is the expression of shame innate?

Sighted, blind and congenitally blind athletes from most cultures displayed shame behaviours after defeat, which is consistent with an innate display that some sighted individuals inhibit in accordance with cultural norms (Tracy & Matsumoto, 2008).

When do children first show shame?

Three-year-olds showed shame after failure and not after success, and significantly more shame after failing easy tasks than difficult ones; girls showed more shame than boys (Lewis et al., 1992).

What happens in the body during shame?

Motivated performance tasks elicited cortisol responses when they were uncontrollable or carried social-evaluative threat, and tasks with both produced the largest cortisol and adrenocorticotropin hormone changes and the longest recovery (Dickerson & Kemeny, 2004); imaging links shame to anterior cingulate, parahippocampal and frontal regions (Michl et al., 2014).

How is shame related to depression and anxiety?

Shame showed significantly stronger associations with depressive symptoms (r = .43) than guilt (r = .28) (Kim et al., 2011), and in most cases only shame remained associated with anxiety symptoms once the variance it shares with guilt was controlled (Cândea & Szentagotai-Tătar, 2018); compassionate mind training reduced shame, depression and anxiety in a small uncontrolled pilot (Gilbert & Procter, 2006).

References