Shame In Children Research Articles

A Developmental Analysis of Pride and Shame

Theoretical and practical questions regarding the development of pride and shame in children are discussed. Feelings of efficacy are suggested as the biologically based emotional precursor to pride; fear of abandonment is suggested as the precursor to shame. On the basis of philosophical and psychological definitions of these emotions, the development of pride and shame is claimed to be linked to both cognitive-developmental factors and socialization. Specific developments through childhood and adolescence in the conditions that produce pride and shame are proposed.

EFFECTS OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SUCCESS OR FAILURE ON CHILDREN'S REPETITIVE MOTOR BEHAVIOR

This is a report of two studies on the conditions and consequences of the arousal of pride and shame in children. In common-sense terms, pride and shame are related to the public exposure of a person's characteristics. People are proud when their good characteristics are exposed, ashamed when their bad characteristics are revealed to the public. In its broadest sense shame is an emotional state that occurs when one's defects, poor abilities, or bad intentions are made public. Pride is an emotional state resulting from the public exposure of good abilities or good intentions. There is no implication that shame and pride are bipolar. In these studies there was no attempt to measure directly the feelings of pride and shame. Rather, the situational factors presumed to arouse the feelings were manipulated and certain behavioral consequences were observed. Pride and shame, then, are intervening variables in the schema. The operations presumed to arouse these feelings are to have the subjects succeed or fail in public (the private condition serves as the control); and the dependent variables are the speed and accuracy of performance on simple visuomotor performances. Although few empirical studies have explicitly investigated pride or shame, the following bodies of empirical literature are relevant to the present research: (a) the effects of failure stress on performance; (b) studies of audience effects; (c) the effects of praise and reproof on performance; and (d) studies of reward and punishment. Only the first two will be discussed here.