Recent discussions of emotions in Buddhism suggest that one of the canonical self-conscious emotions, shame, is an emotion to be endorsed and indeed cultivated. The canonical texts in the Abhidharma Buddhist tradition, endorse hiri as one of the wholesome factors “always found in all good minds” and as one of “the guardians of the world”. Shame is widely taken to be a self-conscious emotion, and so if hiri counts as shame, this seems to be (...) in tension with the central Buddhist claim that we should rid ourselves of the idea that there is a self. Buddhist moral education seems to promote an emotion that fundamentally presupposes something that Buddhist metaphysics fundamentally rejects: a self. This puzzle provides the motivation for our paper, and we will argue for a new understanding of hiri that also has implications for how we should think about one important “self-conscious” moral emotion, guilt. This puzzle about the Buddhist tradition also raises a basic philosophical question: What kinds of moral emotions are theoretically consistent with the denial of a self? We argue that anticipatory guilt might be such an emotion, and that it provides a plausible interpretation of hiri in key Buddhist texts. (shrink)

The paper presents a draft model of the relationship between shame, treated as one of the self-conscious emotions, and the identity formation process. Two main concepts of shame have been discussed here: shame as an adaptive emotion, in line with the evolutionary approach, and as a maladaptive emotion, according to cognitive attribution theory. The main thesis of this paper states that shame has an essential, both constructive and maladaptive, importance for identity development and that its effect is (...) indirect as it works through the mechanisms of emotion regulation. The destructive and disrupting influence of shame is not an immanent feature of this emotion, but it is a consequence of malfunctioning mechanisms of shame regulation. The association of shame with identity formation relates to the exploration dimensions - exploration in breadth, exploration in depth and ruminative exploration, as well as to commitment making and identification with commitment. (shrink)

The main purpose of this article is to elucidate the bright connotation of the self-conscious emotion of pride, namely authentic pride, in the broader context of behavioral governance literature. Scholars in the field of psychology suggest that authentic and hubristic pride represent two facets of the same emotional construct. Yet, our review indicates that in the extant governance research pride has been treated as an exclusively dark leadership trait or self-attribution bias, thereby placing hubris among the main (...) causes of managerial failure. After conceptually differentiating the two aspects of pride, we identify and discuss the myriad of positive governance implications stemming from firm members' tendency toward authentic pride. We argue that the examination of both positive and negative facets of pride constitutes a critical complement to the existing governance landscape largely dominated by economic theories and formal mechanisms of control. This article allows practitioners to better understand the emotional processes involved in governance that are needed to predict the workplace effectiveness of employees, identify individuals prone to experience authentic pride in the early stages of the recruitment process, and design specific interventions for acting upon and putting emotional energy into productive use. (shrink)

Jenefer Robinson believes that feelings can play an important role in the critical evaluation of artworks. In this paper, I want to put some pressure on two important notions in her theory: emotional understanding and affective empathy. I will do this by focusing on the nature of self-conscious emotions. My strategy will be, firstly, to demonstrate the difficulty that Robinson’s two step theory of emotions has in accommodating higher cognitive emotional responses to art. Secondly, I will (...) discuss how the tight connection to the ‘self’ involved in self-conscious emotions makes it difficult to take the emotional perspective of another person as empathy requires. From here, I suggest that Peter Goldie’s feeling-towards and his critique of perspective-shifting may give a better understanding of the role of emotions in the appreciation of art, particularly in the case of reflective emotions. This issue will be explored through a discussion of the expression of autobiographical nostalgia in the work of the avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas. (shrink)

This study examined psychopathological correlates of implicit and explicit shame and guilt in 30 clinical and 129 non-clinical youths aged 8–17 years. Shame and guilt were measured explicitly via two self-reports and a parent report, and implicitly by means of an Implicit Association Test (IAT), while a wide range of psychopathological symptoms were assessed with questionnaires completed by children, parents, and teachers. The results showed no differences of implicit and explicit shame and guilt between the clinical and non-clinical group, (...) implying that dysregulation of these self-conscious emotions is not per definition associated with psychopathology. Correlational analyses indicated that self-reported explicit shame was positively associated with a broad range of internalizing psychopathology, while self-reported explicit guilt was associated with higher levels of anxiety and to some extent lower levels of externalizing psychopathology. Correlations with parent-rated shame and guilt revealed the same pattern of results but were in general weaker. Furthermore, implicit shame and guilt did not show significant correlations with the various measures of psychopathology. It can be concluded that the link between shame and guilt and psychopathology is complex, and partly dependent on the disorder under study and context-related factors defining the maladaptive nature of these self-conscious emotions. (shrink)

The coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented health crisis. Many governments around the world have responded by implementing lockdown measures of various degrees of intensity. To be effective, these measures must rely on citizens’ cooperation. In the present study, we drew samples from the United States (N= 597), Italy (N= 606), and South Korea (N= 693) and examined predictors of compliance with social distancing and intentions to report the infection to both authorities and acquaintances. Data were collected between April 6th (...) and 8th 2020. We investigated the role of cultural orientations of horizontal and vertical individualism and collectivism, self-conscious emotions of shame and guilt related to the infection and trust in the government’s action. Across all countries, vertical collectivism (VC) predicted stronger shame, whereas horizontal collectivism predicted stronger trust in the government. Only in the United States, VC was associated with stronger trust. Stronger feelings of shame predicted lower compliance and intentions to report the infection to both authorities and acquaintances. In contrast, guilt was associated with stronger intentions to report the infection to the authorities. Finally, trust was associated with stronger compliance and intentions to report the infection to the authorities. Unlike Italy and South Korea, the association between trust on compliance was not statistically significant in the United States, implications of the findings, and directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

People experience various negative emotions in their everyday lives. They feel anger toward aggressive drivers, shame for making a mistake at work, and guilt for hurting another person. When these...

Once deemed not respectable as a scientific domain, when behaviourist doctrine held sway, emotion is now an exploding subject of compelling attraction to a wide range of disciplines in psychology and neuroscience. Recent work suggests that the concept of 'affective regulation' has become a buzzword in these areas. Disciplines involved include not only affective neuroscience, but also cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, clinical psychiatric studies into syndromes of emotion dys-regulation , various psychotherapy approaches, and several others, e.g. the increasingly popular fields (...) of meditation and relaxation training. However, the overall conceptualization of emotion and its close ties to cognitive processes continues to befuddle many theorists and researchers, for various reasons. Mario Beauregard , Consciousness, Emotional Self-Regulation and the Brain. (shrink)

This paper explores Max Scheler’s (1874–1928) essay “On Shame and Feelings of Modesty” (Über Scham und Schamgefühl) (1913). It analyzes Scheler’s view on shame as a specifically human self-conscious emotion in which the subject becomes aware of the positive values of the self, i.e., her self-worth. It is argued that, in the context of current research, Scheler should be regarded as defending a radical revisionary approach to this emotion. First, against today’s widespread view that shame is (...) an intrinsically social emotion that requires real or imagined others to take place and which emerges to guarantee compliance with social norms, Scheler argues that shame is an emotion about the self which requires neither a relation with others nor internalized social norms. Second, rather than regarding shame as having a negative impact on the individual and her interpersonal relations, for Scheler, shame accomplishes the valuable function of disclosing and protecting positive values of the self, even if this self is not one’s own. With both claims, Scheler challenges what Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni (2011) have labeled respectively “shame socialism” and “shame pessimism,” and offers an alternative to understand the nature, functions, and varieties of shame which remains as innovative today as it was in his own time. -/- . (shrink)

This book will undoubtedly be useful to scholars and graduate students interested in the relationships between self-consciousness, emotion, the brain, and the...

The aim of this paper is to examine a special subgroup of emotion: self-referential emo- tions such as shame, pride and guilt. Self-referential emotions are usually conceptualized as (i) essentially involving the subject herself and as (ii) having complex conditions such as the capacity to represent others’ thoughts. I will show that rather than depending on a fully fledged ‘theory of mind’ and an explicit language-based self-representation, (i) pre-forms of self-referential emotions appear at early (...) developmental stages already exhib- iting their characteristic structure of the intentional object of the emotion being identical with or intricately related to the subject experiencing the emotional state and that (ii) they precede and substantially contribute to the development of more complex representations and to the development of a self-concept, to social interaction and to ways of understand- ing of other minds. (shrink)

What does the fact that we feel shame tell us about the nature of self? Does shame testify to the presence of a self-concept, a self-ideal, and a capacity for critical self-assessment, or does it rather, as some have suggested, point to the fact that the self is in part socially constructed? Should shame primarily be classified as a self-conscious emotion, is it rather a distinct social emotion, or might this forced alternative be (...) misguided? In the chapter, I contrast certain prevalent cognitivist accounts of shame with different proposals that can be found in the phenomenological tradition and ultimately argue that prototypical forms of shame provide vivid examples of other-mediated forms of self-experience. (shrink)

This paper suggests that autistic people relate to themselves via a third-person perspective, an objective and explicit mode of access, while neurotypical people tend to access the different dimensions of their self through a first-person perspective. This approach sheds light on autistic traits involving interactions with others, usage of narratives, sensitivity and interoception, and emotional consciousness. Autistic people seem to access these dimensions through comparatively indirect and effortful processes, while neurotypical development enables a more intuitive sense of self.

본고는 데카르트 『성찰』에서 등장하는 자아의식의 감정적이고 독특한 성격을 ｢둘째 성찰｣을 중심으로 탐구한다. 이를 위해 본고는 먼저 『성찰』의 자아의식의 형식적이고 일반적인 성격을 강조한 브로우튼의 해석을 살펴본다. 브로우튼의 이러한 해석 자체가 틀린 것은 아니지만, 그는 『성찰』의 주체가 갖는 독특한 성격을 간과한다. 반면, 본고는 ｢첫째 성찰｣, ｢둘째 성찰｣에 대한 검토를 통해서 자아의식의 독특성이 감정의 문제와 밀접히 관련됨을 보인다. 그리고 이를 바탕으로 “집착”, “경이”, “수치”의 감정이 ｢첫째 성찰｣, ｢둘째 성찰｣안에서 어떻게 사용되는지 검토한다. BR 다음으로 본고는 ｢둘째 성찰｣에 나오는 밀랍 조각의 예에 의해 자아의식의 감정적 (...) 독특성이 암묵적인 방식으로 긍정된다는 것을 보인다. 이를 이해하기 위해서는 밀랍 조각의 예가 이중적인 방식의 형상적 환원이라는 것을 이해해야 한다. 즉, 밀랍 조각의 예는 개별적 물체에 대한 형상적 환원인 동시에, 개별적 정신에 대한 형상적 환원이다. 개별적 물체에 대한 형상적 환원은 감각과 사물을 구별하지만 사물로부터 감각을 완전히 제거하지는 않는다. 유비적으로, 정신에 대한 형상적 환원도 감정을 정신과 구별하지만 정신으로부터 감정을 완전히 제거하지 않는다. 그리하여 밀랍 조각의 예는 감각이 밀랍의 독특성을 반영하듯이, 감정이 정신의 독특성을 반영한다는 것을 긍정한다. (shrink)

This essay is broadly conceived as a study of how the emotional experience of shame can play an important role in the construction of personal identity. It considers, on the one hand, the way in which Greek culture conceives the social meaning of this emotion and, on the other, the double representation that Plato provides in the Symposium of two very different forms of pedagogy of shame. Using the Platonic text as a phenomenological source, the author discusses the general validity (...) and relevance to the Greek world of the anthropological scheme that opposes «shame cultures» to «guilt cultures», attributing evolutionary primacy to the latter in terms of the acquisition of individual moral autonomy. (shrink)

This monograph offers new insights into the connection between self-consciousness and emotion. It focuses on what fundamental “feelings of being” tell us about ourselves. The results enrich the philosophy of human affectivity and help shed new light on some pressing, current problems. The author seeks to understand self-consciousness as an affective phenomenon, namely as self-feeling. He identifies it as a pre-reflective, pre-propositional, bodily feeling that shapes our space of possibilities. It is the affective disclosure of individual existence. (...) His account overcomes the difficulties of infinite regress and vicious circularity that reflective accounts of self-consciousness struggle with. At the same time, it helps build a bridge between the basic level of self-consciousness and the higher level of more substantial thoughts about oneself. The title explores fundamental affectivity, Matthew Ratcliffe’s theory of existential feelings, features of self-feeling, and appropriateness and inappropriateness in self-interpretation. It also considers the contributions of the Heidelberg School of self-consciousness to current debates. The title provides students and researchers with a unique look into such vital philosophical questions as: What is self-consciousness? How do we know ourselves? It will also appeal to a wider audience interested in self-consciousness and/or human affectivity since it does not presuppose knowledge of the jargon. (shrink)

Evidence suggests that self-focused attention and cognitive failures may have disruptive effects on the use of specific coping strategies in stressful situations. In this study the personality factors of private self-consciousness (dispositional self-attention) and cognitive failures were investigated in relation to coping processes in specific stressful episodes reported by 139 female nurses. Multiple regression analyses were run to test for personality predictors of problem-focused coping, emotion-focused coping, and suppression-coping strategies. In examining the relationship between personality factors and (...) coping the possible mediational role of subjects' appraisals (importance of the episode and perceptions of control) were investigated. The results showed significant negative correlations between self-attention and emotion-focused and problem-focused coping only in mixed controllability situations. A significant negative correlation between cognitive failures and suppression was similarly dependent on subjects' situation specific control appraisals. The specificity of these relationships is interpreted in terms of the different effects which self-focus, cognitive failures, and control appraisals have on attention. (shrink)

An historical review of the concepts of self-consciousness is presented, highlighting the important role of the body (particularly, body perception but also body action) and the social other in the construction of self-consciousness. More precisely, body perception, especially intermodal sensory perception including kinesthetic perception, is involved in the construction of a sense of self allowing self-nonself differentiation. Furthermore, the social other, through very early social and emotional interactions, provides meaning to the infant’s perception and contributes to (...) the development of his/her symbolization capacities. This is a necessary condition for body image representation and awareness of a permanent self in a time-space continuum (invariant over time and space). Self-image recognition impairments in the mirror are also discussed regarding a comprehensive developmental theory of self-consciousness. Then, a neuropsychological and neurophysiological approach to self-consciousness reviews the role of complex brain activation/integration pathways and the mirror neuron system in self-consciousness. Finally, this article offers new perspectives on self-consciousness evaluation using the mirror as an experimental paradigm to study self- and other- image and body recognition. (shrink)

The main idea -- The functioning of a neuron -- Brain structure and function -- The general structure of the neural network -- Instincts, emotions, free will -- The nature of mental objects -- The rise and essence of (self-)consciousness -- Artificial intelligence -- Cognitive limitations of man.

Consciousness has a number of puzzling features. One such feature is its unity: the experiences and other conscious states that one has at a particular time seem to occur together in a certain way. I am currently enjoying visual experiences of my computer screen, auditory experiences of bird-song, olfactory experiences of coffee, and tactile experiences of feeling the ground beneath my feet. Conjoined with these perceptual experiences are proprioceptive experiences, experiences of agency, affective and emotional experiences, and conscious (...) thoughts of various kinds. These experiences are unified in a variety of ways, but the kind of unity that I’m interested in here concerns their phenomenal character. Take just two of these experiences: the sound of bird-song and the smell of coffee. There is something it is like to have the auditory experience, there is something it is like to have the olfactory experience, and there is something it is like to have both the auditory and olfactory experiences together. These two experiences occur as parts or components or aspects of a larger, more complex experience. And what holds of these two experiences seems to hold – at least in normal contexts – of all of one’s simultaneous experiences: they seem to be subsumed by a single, maximal experience.2 We could think of this maximal experience as an experiential perspective on the world. What it is like to be me right now is (or involves) an extremely complex conscious state that subsumes the various simpler experiences that I outlined above (seeing my computer screen, hearing bird-song, smelling coffee, and so on). I will follow recent literature in using the term “co-consciousness” for the relation that a set of conscious states bear to each other when they have a complex phenomenology (Bayne and Chalmers 2003; Dainton 2000; Hurley 1998; Lockwood 1989). (shrink)

This paper investigates the limits of the constructivist approach to the study of self and emotion in anthropology and outlines a viable alternative to this perspective, namely an experiential approach. The roots of the experiential and constructivist approaches to self and emotion in anthropology are traced to the work of William James and George Herbert Mead respectively. The limitations of the constructivist perspective are explored through a discussion of James's radical empirical doctrine, Anthony P. Cohen's work on creative (...) self-consciousness, and Arlie Hochschild's writings on ‘emotional discrepancy'. A discussion of transpersonal aspects of emotional experience, altered states of consciousness and the experience of ‘pure consciousness’ is used to suggest some further limits of this approach. Finally, connections between this work and some of James’ later writings on self and mystical experience are drawn and the implications of this work for the study of self and emotion are explored. (shrink)

Christopher Peacocke presents a new theory of subjects of consciousness, together with a theory of the nature of first person representation. He identifies three sorts of self-consciousness--perspectival, reflective, and interpersonal--and argues that they are key to explaining features of our knowledge, social relations, and emotional lives.

We elaborate and defend the claim that human affective states are, among other things, self-disclosing. We will show why affective intentionality has to be considered in order to understand human self-consciousness. One specific class of affective states, so-called existential feelings, although often neglected in philosophical treatments of emotions, will prove central. These feelings importantly pre-structure affective and other intentional relations to the world. Our main thesis is that existential feelings are an important manifestation of self-consciousness and (...) figure prominently in human self-understanding. We offer an ordering of four levels of existential feelings and also give considerations in favour of the essential bodily nature of these feelings. (shrink)

Shame, theory of mind (ToM) and self-consciousness were examined in a group of early adolescents aged 10–12 years. The aim was to assess whether the relationship between early adolescents’ dispositional shame and ToM is mediated by their private and public self-consciousness. One hundred adolescents (M = 11;1 years; months, 51 girls) were administered measures assessing dispositional shame and self-consciousness and a ToM test. Results support an essential distinction between the private and public aspects of self-consciousness and (...) show that ToM’s relationship to dispositional shame is mediated by public but not private self-consciousness. The significance of these findings and their potential implications for theoretical models of shame development is discussed. (shrink)

In this article, I provide an analysis of the widespread, intellectually fascinating, and existentially challenging phenomenon of self-reflexive anxiety in which we feel threatened by what or who we are (or have been or will become). I focus on those cases in which we take an event or action whose possible occurrence we attribute to ourselves to be expressive or constitutive of our identity. As I argue, depending on the kind of event we are dealing with, our descriptive (...) class='Hi'>self-conception, our self-esteem, or our evaluative self-conception are at stake. In all cases, we are confronted with a dialectic between self and other, activity and passivity inherent in our personhood or even in our agency. I demonstrate how my analysis is not only of intrinsic value, but it can also help us in achieving a better understanding of self-reflexive emotions in general and ‘traditional’ self-reflexive emotions like shame in particular. (shrink)