Abstract
Dispositional shame and guilt have been associated with psychopathology and an increasing number of studies have traced this relation back to adolescence. This developmental period is thought to be characterized by maturational changes in emotion regulation, which also play an important role in vulnerability to psychopathology, but little is known about the links between emotion regulation and dispositional shame and guilt. The current study investigated the relations between individual differences in the habitual use of a wide range of emotion regulation strategies and proneness to shame and guilt in a large sample of adolescents (N = 706), aged 13 to 17 years. History of childhood trauma was also assessed. Our results showed that emotion regulation independently explained about 20% of the variance of shame-proneness and guilt-proneness. Higher use of maladaptive (e.g., Self-Blaming, Catastrophizing) and lower use of adaptive (e.g., Refocus on Planning, Positive Reappraisal) emotion regulation strategies were positively associated with shame-proneness. In contrast, lower use of maladaptive (e.g., Catastrophizing, Blaming Others) and higher use of adaptive (e.g., Refocus on Planning, Positive Reappraisal) emotion regulation strategies were associated with guilt-proneness, independent of the influence of childhood trauma, which also explained a relatively minor portion of guilt-proneness. Although there were age differences (i.e., rumination was used more by older adolescents, and the influence of emotion regulation on depression and anxiety symptoms increased with age) and sex differences (i.e., girls reported higher use of Putting into Perspective and Other Blaming compared to boys) in emotion regulation, age and sex were not significantly associated with proneness to shame and guilt. The positive relations with maladaptive emotion regulation underscores the dysfunctional nature of shame-proneness. Future studies could use longitudinal measures to establish that emotion regulation drives dispositional shame and guilt, and also investigate whether emotion regulation optimization is able to normalize proneness to shame and guilt and reduce risk for psychopathology.
Highlights
Self-conscious emotions are a special class of emotions that involve people’s reactions to their own characteristics and behavior [1]
The present results show that individual differences in emotion regulation are related to shame-proneness and guilt-proneness in adolescents, independent of the influence of age, sex and childhood trauma
Childhood trauma was related to guilt-proneness, but it explained only a relatively minor portion of its variance compared to emotion regulation
Summary
Self-conscious emotions are a special class of emotions that involve people’s reactions to their own characteristics and behavior [1]. Shame and guilt are negatively valenced self-conscious emotions, typically experienced in situations of failure or in which behavioral standards are violated [1, 2]. Normative levels of shame and guilt are functional and serve social goals [2] They have been linked to empathy towards others [4, 5], prosocial behavior [6,7,8], self-improvement motivation and behavior [9], and lower levels of aggression and antisocial behavior [10, 11]. They seem to indicate that guilt over specific behaviors is not associated with poor psychological adjustment [1, 17], and that guilt becomes maladaptive when it is fused with shame, when people develop a distorted sense of responsibility for events beyond their control, and when opportunities for reparation are blocked [1, 18, 19]
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