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Small or Big in the Eyes of the Other: On the Developmental Psychopathology of Self-Conscious Emotions as Shame, Guilt, and Pride

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Abstract

The self-conscious emotions of guilt, shame, and pride typically occur when people evaluate their own self through the eyes of another person. This article will first of all discuss the nature and function of self-conscious emotions, and describe their developmental course in children and adolescents. Then, a number of variables are discussed that are thought to increase young people’s proneness to experience self-conscious emotions. Following this, the empirical evidence on the relationships between guilt, shame, and pride and various types of psychopathology in children and adolescents will be summarized. A model is presented to explain why these self-conscious emotions are associated with a diversity of psychopathological outcomes. Finally, recommendations for clinical practice are made in terms of assessment and interventions targeting the origins and sequelae of self-conscious emotions.

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Notes

  1. Note that it is not necessary that other people are actually present to elicit self-conscious emotions. Even a look in a mirror can trigger self-awareness, self-representation, and self-evaluation, and thus may evoke this type of emotions. The “observing other” is (un)consciously present in one’s mind (Tracy and Robins 2004a).

  2. During this test, an experimenter surreptitiously makes a rouge mark on the nose or face of a child. The child is then placed in front of a mirror. Children display self-awareness when showing mark-directed behavior: they touch their own nose or face and/or try to wipe the mark off.

  3. On a related matter, adult patients who have lost the cognitive ability to infer others’ emotional states due to orbitofrontal brain damage have been found to be less capable of recognizing self-conscious emotions (Beer et al. 2003).

  4. In this article, Zahn-Waxler et al. (1990) focus on adaptive and maladaptive guilt, of which the latter essentially refers to shame.

  5. Anger is one of the basic emotions (Izard 2007) and can be directed to the self or to the environment (anger-in versus anger-out; see Bridewell and Chang 1997). The Tangney et al. (1996a) study focused on outward-directed anger, which is generally seen as the cognitive precursor of aggressive behavior and therefore can also be classified as an externalizing problem.

  6. To deal with this problem, some researchers have statistically controlled for the overlap between guilt and shame by computing partial correlations in which one self-conscious emotion is correlated with an index of psychopathology while controlling for the other (i.e., shame-free guilt and guilt-free shame).

  7. This “easy task failure paradigm” was originally designed by Lewis et al. (1992) and aimed to prompt children in making a global self-attribution. A pilot study by Thomaes et al. (2005) indeed showed that this procedure was highly effective in inducing feelings of shame.

  8. Tangney and Tracy (2012) have noted that the same is true for the relationship between self-conscious emotions and psychopathology in adults.

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  1. Clinical Psychological Science, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Peter Muris & Cor Meesters

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Muris, P., Meesters, C. Small or Big in the Eyes of the Other: On the Developmental Psychopathology of Self-Conscious Emotions as Shame, Guilt, and Pride. Clin Child Fam Psychol Rev 17, 19–40 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-013-0137-z

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