Self-Conscious Emotion: Shame

    Self-conscious emotions emerge later in life and require complex cognitive abilities for them to come out, with the notion of self as a core part of them. For the elicitation, drawing out information or knowledge, there are three key components of the complex cognitive processes that occur: standards, rules, or goals (SRGs), evaluation (success or failure), and attribution of self (global or specific). The SRGs are the personal and/or social benchmarks that we use to evaluate ourselves; they can be anything from moral standards to societal rules. The self-conscious emotions arise when a person’s behavior is compared to the SRGs; without the internalized standards, there is no measure for feeling pride or shame. Next, comparing our behavior to the standards is where evaluation of the outcome comes in. This cognitive judgement of success (feelings of pride or satisfaction) or failure (feelings of guilt or embarrassment) is what triggers the emotion. Lastly, the attribution of self (global or specific) occurs after the evaluation of the outcome, when we interpret what the outcome means about ourselves. If a failure is seen as global, such as “I am a failure,” then the feeling of shame comes up and is directed at the self as a whole. Whereas when a failure is deemed to regard a specific behavior, for example, “I did a bad thing,” then guilt is what is felt and is put towards the action and not the entire self. All in all, self-conscious emotions are tied to self-awareness and evaluation. 

    In seasons two and three of Grey’s Anatomy, Meredith has an overwhelming emotion of shame. In these seasons, we can see her go through the cognitive process to build this self-conscious emotion. When Meredith finds out that Derek has a wife, Addison, she continues to see him, technically having an affair with him, despite knowing he is still married. Once the other people in the hospital begin to know that she and Derek were doing this, there is a lot of judgment from her colleagues, Addison, and herself. The shame Meredith is feeling during this time is a self-conscious emotion as it arises from her own self-evaluation against her internalized standards, rules, or goals (SRGs) and not just from the external event. Meredith holds a personal standard of being a moral person and is someone who wants to be respected. When she evaluates this occurrence, she sees it as violating her personal standard of being a moral person; she says, “I shouldn’t be the other woman.” Finally, the attribution that triggered the emotion of shame was that instead of focusing on the action, she generalized the failure to her whole self and had thoughts such as “I am broken” and “I ruin everything.” This global, internal, and stable attribution describes the cognitive pattern that produces the emotion of shame. I think she felt shame rather than guilt or embarrassment because of the long-term effects of her evaluation of the situation and the attributions she has regarding herself. Guilt is focused on a specific behavior and Meredith’s reaction goes much deeper as she thinks that she is bad and unworthy, not simply that she did one thing wrong. In addition, embarrassment is more short-lived and social. So, I think that because of the depth of the emotion and how it lingers and reshapes her concept of self, she feels the emotion of shame rather than another emotion associated with failure.