Is shame a moral emotion? After the Muhammad cartoons controversy, many Danes argued that freedom of speech should be limited by a sense of decency, that insulting Islam for the sake of insult was shameful. Ten years later, the Danish government’s anti-refugee policy led some to say they were ashamed of being Danish. Here shame is given moral significance as the guardian of decency. However, psychologists like Tangney and Dearing have claimed that shame is morally counter-productive: it makes us react (...) in antisocial ways, covering up our failings, shunning contact with others or lashing out in anger. Some have recently argued that the rise of right-wing populism in many Western nations is fueled by the psychological mechanism of transforming shame into rage. This seems a case of shame backfiring to cause antisocial behavior. In this paper, I seek to illuminate this dilemma by analyzing how self and others relate in shame. I defend that shame is an emotion of social self-consciousness, where one’s own self-assessment is fundamentally mediated by others. It may pull us in moral and immoral directions, but it is anyway part of the sensibilities that make us moral. My central examples, though, are cases of group-based shame. Is shame equally appropriate, and does it have the same significance, when it is group-based? I argue that the conditions of appropriateness change, but the structure of the emotion and its moral significance remains unchanged. (shrink)

In this article we explore a self-regulatory perspective on the self-evaluative moral emotions, shame and guilt. Broadly conceived, self-regulation distinguishes between two types of motivation: approach/activation and avoidance/inhibition. We use this distinction to conceptually understand the socialization dimensions (parental restrictiveness versus nurturance), associated emotions (anxiety versus empathy), and forms of morality (proscriptive versus prescriptive) that serve as precursors to each self-evaluative moral emotion. We then examine the components of shame and guilt experiences in greater detail and conclude with more general (...) implications of a self-regulatory perspective on moral emotions. (shrink)

ObjectiveThe family remains one of the most important relationship systems into early adulthood and provides an important foundation for lifelong mental health. Dysfunctional family cohesion can promote adjustment problems in adolescents and might also affect adolescents’ self-concept and strategies for coping with emotional distress. To test these relationships and the underlying mechanisms, we proposed a dual mediation model describing the associations between family cohesion and internalizing and externalizing problems, mediated by shame-proneness and expressive suppression.MethodsA sample of 526 German-speaking adolescents aged (...) 14 to 18 years from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland participated in an online self-report survey encompassing questionnaires on family cohesion, shame-proneness, expressive suppression, and psychological problems. We tested a path model to examine the indirect pathways of the associations between family cohesion and internalizing and externalizing problems via shame-proneness and expressive suppression, while controlling for age, gender, and guilt-proneness.ResultsWe found a significant dual mediation of the associations between family cohesion and internalizing and externalizing problems by shame-proneness and expressive suppression. The indirect pathways were all significant, except for the indirect pathway from family cohesion to externalizing problems via shame-proneness.DiscussionOur results provide a model for the mechanisms by which disrupted family cohesion can be related to psychological problems in adolescents. Expressive suppression emerged as crucial when considering the consequences of shame-proneness in adolescents, as it was only indirectly related to externalizing problems via expressive suppression. (shrink)

Active white ignorance is accompanied by an epistemic and affective insensitivity that allows American white people to avoid the negative affect that might typically accompany harmdoing. Resisting active ignorance about racism and white supremacy, therefore, often gives rise to shame. Yet, thinkers have debated the value of shame for white people’s antiracism. This article asserts that shame is an appropriate response for white people recognizing our culpability for and complicity in racist injustices and violence. However, the article exposes problems with (...) philosophical accounts of white shame, and draws on recent psychological research to show that contextual factors actually determine whether shame can support white antiracism. The article proposes a role for shame in what José Medina calls an “ethics and epistemology of discomfort,” arguing that there are conditions under which shame may encourage the sustained self-interrogation, sensitivity, and humility required if white people are to contribute meaningfully to antiracist action. (shrink)

This article argues that Bowers and Paternoster’s emphasis on a moral community marks an important step towards a more ethical and effective approach to anti-doping. However, it also argues that the authors’ proposed strategies undermine their stated goal of effectively engaging athletes as partners in anti-doping efforts and raise ethical concerns. Their proposed emphasis on exploiting shaming as a punishment and their general view of athletes as adversaries fosters mistrust between athletes and those who enforce the anti-doping rules. Instead, this (...) article describes a model for empowering athletes as stakeholders in anti-doping policy as a means to provide anti-doping rules with increased moral legitimacy among athletes. (shrink)

This paper offers a sustained philosophical meditation on contrasting interpretations of the emotion of shame within four academic discourses—social psychology, psychological anthropology, educational psychology and Aristotelian scholarship—in order to elicit their implications for moral education. It turns out that within each of these discourses there is a mainstream interpretation which emphasises shame’s expendability or moral ugliness (and where shame is typically described as guilt’s ugly sister), but also a heterodox interpretation which seeks to retrieve and defend shame. As the heterodox (...) interpretation seems to offer a more realistic picture of shame’s role in moral education, the provenance of the mainstream interpretation merits scrutiny. I argue that social scientific studies of the concept of shame, based on its supposed phenomenology, incorporate biases in favour of excessive, rather than medial, forms of the emotion. I suggest ways forward for more balanced analyses of the nature, moral justification and educative role of shame. (shrink)

We examined an account of vicarious shame that explains how people can experience a self-conscious emotion for the behaviour of another person. Two divergent processes have been put forward to explain how another's behaviour links to the self. The group-based emotion account explains vicarious shame in terms of an in-group member threatening one's social identity by behaving shamefully. The empathy account explains vicarious shame in terms of empathic perspective taking; people imagine themselves in another's shameful behaviour. In three studies using (...) autobiographical recall and experimental inductions, we revealed that both processes can explain why vicarious shame arises in different situations, what variation can be observed in the experience of vicarious shame, and how all vicarious shame can be related to a threat to the self. Results are integrated in a functional account of shame. (shrink)

Previous research has found a rich lexicon of shame and guilt terms in Chinese, but how comparable these terms are to “shame” or “guilt” in English remains a question. We identified eight commonly used Chinese terms translated as “shame” and “guilt”. Study 1 assessed the Chinese terms’ intensities, social characteristics, and action tendencies among 40 Chinese speakers. Testing term production in the reverse direction, Study 2 asked another Chinese-speaking sample (N = 85) to endorse emotion terms in response to eight (...) eliciting scenarios generated using each term’s social characteristics from Study 1. A native English-speaking sample (N = 83) was also included to examine the production of English emotion terms and compare motivational tendencies cross-culturally. Using this cross-referencing method, we found that some of the Chinese terms shared similar social-functional characteristics to their English translation, but some had distinct profiles. The two large shame-like and guilt-like term categories yielded in Study 1 were replicated in Study 2’s Chinese term-production task where larger-scale correspondences between categorised elicitors and term clusters were found. Meanwhile, English speakers’ term use provided further evidence for the equivalence between some Chinese terms and “shame” or “guilt” both in terms of their social and motivational characteristics. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPride is seen as both a self-conscious emotion as well as a social emotion. These categories are not mutually exclusive, but have brought forth different ideas about pride as either revolving around the self or as revolving around one’s relationship with others. Current measures of pride do not include intrapersonal elements of pride experiences. Social comparisons, which often cause experiences of pride, contain three elements: the self, the relationship between the self and another person, and the other person. From the (...) literature on pride, we distilled three related elements; perceptions and feelings of self-inflation, other-distancing, and other-devaluation. In four studies, we explored whether these elements were present in pride experiences. We did so at an implicit and explicit level, in an academic setting with in vivo and imagined pride experiences. The data consistently revealed that the exper... (shrink)

Despite the growing social interest in green products, companies often find it difficult to find effective strategies to induce consumers to purchase green products or engage in other environmentally friendly behaviors. To address this situation, we examined the favorable or unfavorable effects of positive and negative message frames on consumers’ willingness to consume green products in different psychological distance contexts. Through two Studies, we found that the positive information framework played a more pronounced role in context when consumers were in (...) closer spatial distances. More importantly, we found that the emotional factors of fear and hope were intrinsic causes of this phenomenon. Correspondingly, the negative information framework played a better facilitating role in context with farther spatial distance, while shame and pride were the emotions responsible for this effect. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our work, as well as its limitations and future research directions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTNumerous studies have found that shame increases individuals’ anger at others. However, according to recent theories about the social function of shame and anger at others, it is possible that shame controls individuals’ anger at others in specific conditions. We replicated previous findings that shame increased individuals’ anger at others’ unfairness, when others were not aware of the individual’s experience of shameful events. We also found for the first time that shame controlled or even decreased individuals’ anger at others’ unfairness, (...) when others were aware of the individual’s experience of shameful events. The results were consistent when shame was induced by either a recall paradigm or an imagination paradigm, and in either the ultimatum game or the dictator game. This suggests that shame strategically controls individuals’ anger at others to demonstrate that they are willing to benefit others, when facing the risk of social exclusion. Our findings highlight the interpersonal function of... (shrink)

Despite society’s increasing sensitivity toward green production, companies often struggle to find effective communication strategies that induce consumers to buy green products or engage in other environmentally friendly behaviors. To add clarity to this situation, we investigated the effectiveness of negative versus positive message framing in promoting green products, whereby companies highlight the detrimental versus beneficial environmental consequences of choosing less versus more green options, respectively. Across four experiments, we show that negatively framed messages are more effective than positively framed (...) ones in prompting consumers to engage in pro-environmental behaviors. More importantly, we find that anticipated shame is the emotion responsible for this effect. Furthermore, both environmental concern and the type of product promoted serve as moderators; thus, the mediating role of anticipated shame is attenuated when environmental concern is low and the product is a luxury one. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our work, along with its limitations and some directions for future research. (shrink)

In this article, we review the shame and ethical behavior literature in order to more fully develop theory and testable propositions for organizational scholars focusing on the behavioral implications of this ‘moral’ emotion. We propose a dual pathway multilevel model that incorporates complex relationships between felt and anticipatory shame processes and ethical behavior, both within and between persons and at the collective level. We propose a holistic treatment of shame that includes dispositional and organizational influences on the cognitive and emotional (...) forces that shape ethical behavior in organizations. The implications of our review of shame for ethical behavior, organizations, and concrete research action are discussed. (shrink)

This article provides an analysis of moral emotions from an attributional point of view, guided by the metaphors of man as a naïve scientist (Heider, 1958) and as a moral judge (Weiner, 2006). The theoretical analysis focuses on three concepts: (a) The distinction between the actor and the observer, (b) the functional quality of moral emotions, and (c) the perceived controllability of the causes of events. Moral emotions are identified (admiration, anger, awe, contempt, disgust, elevation, embarrassment, envy, gratitude, guilt, indignation, (...) jealousy, pity, pride, rage, regret, remorse, resentment, respect, schadenfreude, scorn, shame, and sympathy). A classification of these moral emotions is suggested and the empirical evidence briefly summarized. In discussing our results, we identify unresolved issues awaiting further analyses and research. (shrink)