Utanç ve Suçluluk Duygularının Bilişsel Psikoloji Kapsamında Değerlendirilmesi
Evaluation of Shame and Guilt Emotions in the Scope of Cognitive Psychology
This review aims to introduce shame and guilt in an extensive manner and emphasize their importance in the scope of cognitive psychology. For this purpose, these emotions are detailed from different perspectives. These emotions appear as a reaction when people believe that they violate a rule settled by others. Thus, shame and guilt are social emotions because they are felt against someone else living together in society (Gilbert, 2003). These emotions also affect cognitive functions, such as perspective taking, decision making, and problem solving abilities. Although their effects on behavior and cognitive structures have been studied in clinical and developmental fields of psychology, they have not attracted the same attention in cognitive psychology. However, to explain the reflections they have on observable behaviors, their relation to cognition must be clarified.
Fundemental properties cause shame and guilt to differ from basic emotions. Basic emotions emerge as a reflex in the first year of life, whereas shame and guilt require selfconcept development as a precondition to appear. Accordingly, late development of these emotions is described in terms of their functions in social life and their connection to culture. At this point, self-dependent nature and social characteristics of them may define shame and guilt as social emotions. These emotions are also defined as moral emotions because they motivate people to behave in accordance with social rules in society. However, social rules are not same in every culture; therefore, situations that trigger shame and guilt may differ across cultures. In addition, differentiation of shame and guilt from each other should receive considerable critical attention. Although these emotions are often used interchangeably, shame and guilt differ from each other in terms of the destructive nature of shame and the constructive nature of guilt. Self-behavior distiction is emphasized as the main reason why these emotions are related to different characteristics (Lewis, 1971). Likewise, Tracy, and Robins (2004) presented attribution theory, which identifies selfbehavior distinction as the main underlying reason of different outputs of shame and guilt. Shame is elicited by attributing experienced negative events to self, whereas guilt is experienced by attributing this event to a specific behavior. Attributing a negative event to self is more damaging than linking it with current behavior. Shame and guilt are evaluated based on both state and trait levels. While proneness to these emotions is described as a tendency to experience specific emotions in response to various events (Tangney, 1995), state of shame and guilt is described as feelings at the time of events happening (Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007). These distinct levels, proneness and state, are thought to affect cognition differently. Nonoverlapping findings for proneness and state levels of shame and guilt show the necessity to consider both levels while evaluating these emotions. Available evolutionary and neurocognitive resources also point out the cognitive aspect of shame and guilt. The evolutionary approach asserts that the function of shame and guilt is to maintain one’s social status in society rather than to ensure survival. Kemeny, Gruenewald, and Dickerson (2004) supported this assertion with the concept of social self-preservation system. They claimed that shame and guilt capture possible danger to the social self in the environment and provide appropriate psychological, physiological, and behavioral responses. Besides, the neurocognitive findings about shame and guilt bring extensions in some brain regions into consideration. Although the aforementioned studies point to the multifaceted relationship of shame and guilt with cognitive psychology, studies on shame and guilt in this field are limited. Even though these few studies in cognitive psychology partially support the current literature (e.g., shame has damaging influence, whereas guilt has beneficial influence), the results are inconsistent across studies and methodological problems need to be addressed. A brief summary is provided about which topics have been studied in relation to shame and guilt emotions in Turkey. In light of the provided examples, shame and guilt have remarkable roles in other fields of psychology. Therefore, cognitive influences of shame and guilt may be discovered in future studies, and underlying mechanisms of behavior may be elucidated. In this way, other fields of psychology can make reasonable inferences about the possible relation of shame and guilt with many other psychological topics. Such inferences indicate increased opportunities of more appropriate treatment and preservation programs for shame or guilt based issues.
In summary, this review calls attention to the cognitive aspect of shame and guilt, which are considerable emotions for psychology, and serves as an alternative and essential development in the discovery of behavior and cognition.