Guilt, shame, and embarrassment: similar or different emotions? A comparison between Italians and Americans

Abstract

Introduction: Guilt, shame, and embarrassment represent affective experiences with social implications and diverse self-relevant negative affect. While the distinction between these emotion terms has been extensively investigated, little is known about how they diverge and are related to each other and their crosscultural differences.

Methods: Here, we used a community sample (N = 163) comprised of Americans and Italians and a scenario-based measure in which we asked participants to report the intensity of emotions that the story's main character would feel. The elements used to build the scenarios were based on a recent theoretical approach that proposes distinguishing cognitive, somatic, interoceptive, and behavioral ingredients to differentiate between these emotions. We hypothesized that these ingredients might effectively elicit the target emotions and that the main differences across these cultures would be associated with the emotion terms of shame/vergogna.

Results: Our findings suggest that these defining elements are effective in evoking experiences of guilt, shame, and embarrassment. Moreover, we found that shame was equally elicited by the Shame and Guilt Scenarios only in the American sample, thus suggesting a proximity between shame and guilt in the American sample compared to the Italian's terms of vergogna and colpa.

Discussion: These results suggest important implications for the psychology of moral emotions and highlight the importance of taking into account some cognitive factors, such as the quality of self-evaluation, the discrepancy between the actual self and the ideal self vs. the sense of perceived responsibility, and the different domains related to self-esteem.

Keywords: ashamed; cultural diversity; embarrassed; emotions; guilty; vignette.

Figure 1

Emotions rating across scenarios in the Italian and American samples. The figure shows the violin plots with the superimposed box plots of the self-reported emotions intensity across the four scenarios (shame, guilt, embarrassment-1, embarrassment-2) in the Italian (panel A) and American groups (panel B). The violin plots show the distribution of ratings for each scenario. The box plots show the median rating (the dark horizontal lines), the 75th percentile to the 25th percentile (the boxes), and the upper and lower boundaries 1.5*75th (or 25th) quartiles (the whiskers). Ratings were provided on a scale from 1 (not at all) to 10 (extremely) in response to the question “How strongly the main character feels this emotion?”.

Figure 2

Emotions rating across scenarios in the Italian and American sample. The figure shows the violin plots with the superimposed box plots of the self-reported emotions intensity across the four scenarios (shame, guilt, embarrassment-1, embarrassment-2) for the emotions colpa/guilt, vergogna/shame, and imbarazzo/embarrassment. The violin plots show the distribution of ratings for each scenario. The box plots shows the median rating (the dark horizontal lines), the 75th percentile to the 25th percentile (the boxes), and the upper and lower boundaries 1.5*75th (or 25th) quartiles (the whiskers).

Figure 3

Emotions rating in the three target emotions in the Italian and American sample. Observed ratings and estimated marginal means for guilt/colpa, shame/vergogna, and embarrassment/imbarazzo. The lines are for display purpose only. *p < 0.05 Bonferroni multiple comparison correction.