Abstract
The present study examined the relationships between dysregulations in self-conscious emotions and psychopathology in clinically referred children and adolescents. For this purpose, parent-, teacher-, and self-report Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment data of 1000 youth aged 4–18 years was analyzed as this instrument not only provides information on the intensity levels of lack of guilt, guilt, and shame, but also on the severity of various types of psychopathology. The results first of all indicated that dysregulations of self-conscious emotions were more common in this clinical sample than in the general population. Further, a consistent pattern was found with regard to the relationships between self-conscious emotions and childhood psychopathology. That is, lack of guilt was predominantly associated with oppositional defiant and conduct (i.e., externalizing) problems, while guilt and shame were primarily linked with affective and anxiety (i.e., internalizing) problems. By and large, these findings confirm what has been found in non-clinical youth, and suggest that self-conscious emotions play a small but significant role in the psychopathology of children and adolescents.
Highlights
The self-conscious emotions of guilt and shame help people to navigate successfully in the social environment
On the basis of these descriptions, one might get the impression that guilt is somewhat more adaptive than shame, but it is good to keep in mind that in essence both types of self-conscious emotions have their own functionality in correcting moral and social transgressions
T tests for independent samples were conducted to compare intensity levels for lack of guilt, guilt, and shame in these clinically referred youths with those reported for non-clinical children and adolescents in the Dutch manual of the ASEBA instrument [29,30,31]
Summary
The self-conscious emotions of guilt and shame help people to navigate successfully in the social environment. The few studies that have been conducted in clinical settings so far [24, 25: Study 2] relied on populations that were ill-described in terms of psychopathology and were limited in terms of sample size (N’s being 41 and 20, respectively) The results of these investigations were quite mixed, which is not surprising given earlier findings that relations between guilt and shame and psychopathological symptoms may critically depend on the type of psychopathology under study. With these drawbacks in mind, the present research project was conducted to further explore the links between the self-conscious emotions of guilt and shame and psychopathology in clinical youth. Girls tend to display somewhat higher levels of guilt and shame as compared to boys [32], and it is assumed that there is a clear age-related progression of children’s understanding and experience of these self-conscious emotions [33,34,35]
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