Self-conscious Emotions Shame and Guilt Are Not Equally " Moral " or Psychologically Adaptive Emotions

All human emotions are, in a loose sense, " self-relevant. " Emotions arise when something self-relevant happens or is about to happen. In the language of appraisal theory (Lazarus, 1966), we experience emotions when we judge that events have positive or negative significance for our well-being. The specific type of emotional response is shaped both by such primary appraisals of events' positive vs. negative implications for the individual, and by secondary appraisals (e.g., of one's ability to cope with the events). But all emotions arise from events that in some way have relevance for oneself. There is, however, a special class of human emotions that are even more immediately self-relevant. This chapter focuses on these " self-conscious " emotions, which directly involve self-reflection and self-evaluation. Shame, guilt, embarrassment, and pride are members of a family of " self-conscious emotions " that are evoked by self-reflection and self-evaluation. This self-evaluation may be implicit or explicit, consciously experienced or transpiring beyond our awareness. But in one way or another, these emotions fundamentally involve people's reactions to their own characteristics or behavior. For example, when good things happen, we may feel a range of positive emotions-joy, happiness, satisfaction or contentment. But we feel pride in our own positive attributes or actions. By the same token, when bad things happen, many negative emotions are possible – for example, sadness, disappointment, frustration, or anger. But feelings of shame and guilt typically arise from the recognition of one's own negative attributes or behaviors. Even when we feel shame due to another person's behavior, that person is almost invariably someone with whom we are closely affiliated or identified (e.g., a family member, friend or colleague closely associated with oneself). We experience shame because that person is part of our self-definition. One way to understand the distinction between self-conscious and non-self-conscious emotions is to think about how every emotion is uniquely influenced, and in some cases dramatically shifted, by the involvement of self-processes, such as self-reflection and self-evaluation. These processes convert what would otherwise be sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and joy into the more self-relevant emotions of shame, guilt, hostility, contempt, and pride. For example, fear can become transmuted into guilt when we think about what our fear means for our identity; this may be why Franklyn Delano Roosevelt's famous statement, " The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, " had a major impact on …