Self-Conscious Emotions: Where Self and Emotion Meet

In so far as a man amounts to anything, stands for anything, is truly an individual, he has an ego about which his passions cluster. .. We are virtually always in a state of pride or shame. T he centrality of emotion and self to social life is almost axiomatic in the psychological literature. What is less accepted, or at least less frequently discussed, is the essential interconnection between these two domains. Yet, as the quotations above suggest, self and emotion are inextricably linked. The experience of self is shaped by a constant and ever-changing flurry of emotions (i.e., " passions "), and feelings of pride, shame, and other emotions could not exist without perceptions and evaluations of the self (Brown & Marshall, 2001). The traditional disconnect between the self and emotion literatures stems, in part, from their divergent theoretical roots. Emotion researchers have, to a large extent, embraced a biological model of affect. This approach has led to major advances in our understanding of the neural underpinnings and adaptive functions of emotions, their interactions with basic cognitive processes, and their automatically recognized and expressed nonverbal signals also led researchers to neglect psychologically complex emotions, such as pride and shame, which are more closely linked to self-evaluative processes. The disconnect also results from the traditional emphasis in the self literature on cognitive rather than affective processes. When research on self-processes began to flourish in the late 1970s and 1980s, the cognitive perspective was emerging as the dominant paradigm, displacing the previously dominant paradigm of The cognitive approach to studying the self has led to major developments in our understanding of how the self " works " from an information-processing perspective