Self-Conscious Emotions: Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment

Yedidya Levy

Sep 20

2 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

Written By: Dr. Yedidya Levy

Helen Block Lewis (1971) formulated an important distinction between shame and guilt. She stated that shame involves the “self” as the object of evaluation, whereas guilt involves the evaluation of one’s behavior. This differentiation laid the cornerstone for the research on shame that followed in the work of Tangney and Dearing, the authors of Shame and Guilt (2002), and many other published works on the subject. These distinct emotions are associated with fundamentally different outcomes in therapy (Brown, 2012). While guilt, or the feeling of doing something wrong, is associated with positive changes in behavior and well-being, shame, or the feeling of being inherently defective, is correlated with hopelessness, addiction, violence, aggression, depression, eating disorders, and bullying (Lewis, 1971; Tangney & Dearing, 2002).

Shame is further differentiated from other forms of self-conscious emotion, such as humiliation and embarrassment. Humiliation is the feeling brought about by being degraded or minimized while believing it is undeserved (Klein, 1991), whereas with shame, the individual experiences feelings of inadequacy and believes them to be an accurate representation of the self. Finally, embarrassment is the least severe of these emotions, and it is often associated with having done something silly, although this is not uncommon. Embarrassing moments are typically seen as funny following the passage of time, and they do not reflect the adequacy or quality of the individual (Brown, 2012).