Shame and guilt: A hundred years of apples and oranges

Abstract An original model of shame- and guilt-related emotions is proposed and the model's theoretical background discussed. Shame is conceptualized as an affect (i.e., basic emotion), elicited by personal devaluation and evolved by social selection. Guilt is conceptualized as a cognitively assessed condition. In response to awareness of one's own condition of guilt, one may feel a number of affects or no affect. The phrase feeling guilty is a non-specific reference to feeling as one typically feels when in the condition of guilt [Ortony, A. (1987). Is guilt an emotion? Cognition and emotion, 1, 283–298]. Thus, shame as a construct represents a single affect, while feelings of guilt represent multiple affective–cognitive hybrids, which may be associated with the condition of guilt. In terms of levels of categorization [Rosch, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In E. Rosch & B. B. Lloyd (Eds.), Cognition and categorization (pp. 27–48). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum], shame, as an affect, is a basic level category with subordinates such as embarrassment and humiliation; in contrast, the multiple feelings of guilt constitute multiple subordinate affective–cognitive hybrids—subordinate to a number of basic level affects. This model integrates a great deal of existing data, suggests a large number of hypotheses, and implies the need for a profile approach to the assessment of guilt. By conceptualizing shame as an affect, and making the distinction between guilt as a state and the multiple affective–cognitive hybrids of guilt, much of the confusion and imprecision in past theory and research may be clarified.