Embarrassment, shame, and guilt
Embarrassment, shame, and guilt are related but also distinct emotions. Embarrassment arises from discomfort when some aspect of oneself is unveiled in a way that undermines the image that one seeks to project to others. Shame, however, relates to one’s moral character and a sense of falling short of accepted moral norms. It relates to feeling bad about oneself as a person and not solely in relation to one’s social character or image. The last of this trio of emotions, guilt, is commonly arises from an adverse evaluation of an act, which is accompanied by remorse or regret.
While shame involves falling short of usually more widely accepted moral standards, guilt involves falling short of one’s own moral standards. For instance, one can feel guilt about things that fall below one’s personal set of ‘rules’, but which wider society broadly considers socially or morally acceptable.
Shame and guilt are inextricably part of being a human being. They manifest in individuals but also in wider groups or societies — hence collective shame or guilt at historical wrongdoing or injustice, for example.
psychological, anthropological, sociological, historical, cultural, philosophical, religious, and political vantage points.
Key thematic areas include:
- Politics and social life (e.g., racism, nationalism, institutional guilt, climate change, etc)
- Conflict and violence (e.g. genocide, survivors, warfare, etc)
- Memory studies (e.g. forgetfulness, repression, memory distortion, imagined or irrational shame and guilt, secret keeping, inherited and historical guilt, etc)
- Interpersonal dynamics (e.g. relationships, child-parent interactions, personal development, therapy, well-being, privacy etc)
- Religious (e.g., concept of sin, forgiveness, condemnation, renewal and restoration)
- Cultural representations (e.g., via literature, visual arts, media, journalism, etc)
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