Problems with the assessment of shame and guilt

Abstract

Among human emotions there is a specific group of feelings that are connected with the way one sees one's self and one's actions as well as with one's self-concept in the sphere of social relations. In foreign writings such emotions are called self­ conscious emotions, while Russian scholars call them social, meaning that there are other people within the context of the current emotional phenomena, or moral, meaning that they are the key feature of a person's morality and help draw a line between moral standards and moral behavior (Breslav, 2006). The feelings of shame and guilt occupy a central place in one's moral life.Shame and guilt develop naturally in the process of internalization--that is, the gradual transformation of one's (external) social-control mechanisms into one's own internal rules of behavior (Kon, 1979). Consequently, one of the most important functions of shame and guilt is to regulate (to deter) unethical and antisocial behavior (Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007).Thus, the feeling of shame is crucial mainly because it helps one consider one's relations with others. The appearance of shame means these relations have gone wrong. The feeling of guilt, in its turn, regulates moral behavior: it makes one constantly analyze one's values and build one's life in accordance with moral standards to the maximum possible extent.Shame and guilt make people sensitive to the feelings, attitudes, opinions, and assessments of those around them, and, consequently, they act as a force that brings people together. These emotions, according to Izard (1999), maintain conformity, encourage social responsibility, limit egocentrism and selfishness, and, thus, promote communication.However, these emotions can transgress social adaptation and can complicate interpersonal communication when there is too much or not enough of them (Breslav, 2006; Potter-Efron, 2002).Although scholars are unanimous in admitting that these two moral emotions are crucial for one's ethical and moral behavior, they disagree about how these emotions should be defined, differentiated, and measured (Cohen et al., 2011; Tangney, 1996; Tangney et al., 2007).The first references to the significant role of the social emotions can be found as early as in Freud's work The Ego and the Id (1923). Freud regards the feeling of guilt as an indicator of internal conflict and the feeling of shame as a means of controlling sexual impulses, especially exhibitionism and voyeurism. The feelings of guilt and shame were further considered by Franz Alexander, and played a significant role in Erik Erikson's stages of development. Yet all the following works of psychoanalysis discussed various models only of the differentiation of shame and guilt, as well as the order of their appearance in one's development.The first big symposium on emotions, held in 1928, did not even raise the question of social emotions, while the second symposium, held in 1948, presented two reports on the feelings of shame and guilt: one by an American psychiatrist, Richard L. Jenkins, who defined guilt as a feeling of self-discontent caused by the realization that there is a discrepancy between one's behavior and accepted moral standards and who stated that the purpose of guilt is to adjust one's behavior to moral standards; and the other study by a Belgian psychologist, Joseph Nuttin, who connected shame with a breach in the immunity of the inner world and of psychological intimacy (Breslav, 2006).The Russian psychological school has also made attempts at describing and researching social emotions: the analysis of preschool children's feeling of shame as an indicator of their moral development, done by E.I. Kulchitskaya (1966); the work of V.L. Levi and L.Z. Volkov on shyness (1970); the analysis of empathy, done by T.P. Gavrilova (1974).Since the turn of the century there has been a considerable increase in interest in self-conscious emotions among scholars; however when analyzing the papers,we mainly come across foreign works on the subject (including those by K. …