Shame and guilt, while the focus of attention among scholars and clinicians for generations, have only recently been subjected to systematic empirical scrutiny. This volume reports on the growing body of knowledge on these key self-conscious emotions, integrating findings from the authors' original research program with other data emerging from social, clinical, personality, and developmental psychology. Writing in an engaging, accessible style, June Price Tangney and Ronda L. Dearing offer a coherent new scientific perspective on shame and guilt. Compelling evidence is presented to demonstrate that these universally experienced affective phenomena have significant--and surprisingly disparate--implications for many aspects of human functioning, with particular relevance for interpersonal relationships.
I Question their Central Message I work on the role of the social emotions (empathy, shame, guilt, sympathy, pride, positive and negative altruism, etc.) in promoting social cooperation. In this work, my colleagues and I treat guilt as a self-evaluative emotion, not depending on whether others agree with us or know what we have done, and we treat shame as an interpersonal emotion, depending on how others think of us. As such guilt is probably uniquely human, and shame is very close to uniquely human (perhaps dogs, highly domesticated to meet human social needs, feel shame). Both shame and guilt, we believe, evolved because they enhanced individual human fitness is the context of a highly complex social order in which deviations from social norms would likely be punished.
In this book Tangney and Dearing propose a definition of guilt close to ours, but define shame as a self-evaluative emotion in which one's total worth as a person is brought into question, whereas guilt deals with more specific behaviors. Thus for the authors, both shame and guilt are self-evaluative emotions. This definition suits their purposes because their evidence is in the form of self-description (attitude and personality surveys). Their conclusion is that shame is dysfunctional in the sense that individuals who tend to evaluate their behavior in terms of shame have a difficult time dealing with others and ameliorating their behavior, whereas those who evaluate themselves in terms of guilt are more likely to be able to correct the problem.
I think the authors' results are compatible with the more general use of the term "shame" in interpersonal interactions. The capacity for shame is both prosocial and individually welfare-enhancing (those without shame tend to be sociopaths), but the tendency to apply shame evaluations to oneself may be personally dysfunctional.
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