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)

University students from Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, and Portugal were given a list of morally relevant behaviors, the Schwartz Value Survey and Tangney’s TOSCA, measuring empathic guilt, guilt over norm-breaking, and shame. A factor analysis of MRB yielded 4 dimensions: prosocial behaviors, interpersonal transgressions, antisocial behaviors and secret transgressions. Prosocial behaviors were predicted by self-transcendence–self-enhancement value contrast only while the three transgression categories were associated with both SET and openness to change–conservation contrast. Norm-breaking guilt was more strongly associated with behaviors than (...) were empathic guilt and shame. However, shame was associated with secret transgressions in three countries, after controlling for values. The associations were strongest in Bulgaria and Estonia while fewer associations were found in Finland and Portugal. The implications of the findings for the cross-cultural psychology of morality are discussed. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that shaming interventions and messages during Covid-19 have drawn the relationship between public health and shame into a heightened state of contention, offering us a valuable opportunity to reconsider shame as a desired outcome of public health work, and to push back against the logics of individual responsibility and blame for illness and disease on which it sits. We begin by defining shame and demonstrating how it is conceptually and practically distinct from stigma. We then (...) set out evidence on the consequences of shame for social and relational health outcomes and assess the past and present dimensions of shame in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, primarily through a corpus of international news stories on the shaming of people perceived to have transgressed public health directions or advice. Following a brief note on shame (and policymaking) in a cultural context, we turn to the concept and practice of ‘shame-sensitivity’ in order to theorise a set of practical and adaptable principles that could be used to assist policymakers in short- and medium-term decision-making on urgent, tenacious, and emerging issues within public health. Finally, we consider the longer consequences of pandemic shame, making a wider case for the acknowledgement of the emotion as a key determinant of health. (shrink)