Shame, When You're Too Ashamed to Talk About It

a post by Kurt Smith for the World of Psychology blog



Daily we all experience a variety of emotions. Certain things make us happy, others sad. We may see certain people and feel love, or see other people who make us angry. And although most of us don’t go around discussing each emotion we are feeling, we aren’t really thinking about hiding them either. There is, however, one emotion that people sometimes feel and go to great lengths to avoid discussing, showing or admitting. Shame.

Shame is a painful emotion that causes us to feel inadequate, unworthy and as though we have failed at, well, likely everything. It’s often confused with embarrassment or guilt, but it’s actually very different than either one. Although there are similarities between the three emotions, shame is a much deeper and damaging emotion than the others.

Embarrassment is generally a short-lived and fairly superficial emotion. It certainly can cause distress, and we would all rather avoid feeling embarrassed than embrace it. But typically embarrassment occurs over relatively small events and is gotten over fairly quickly.

Guilt is the feeling of remorse over actions or behaviors that have caused harm to ourselves or someone else. The feeling pertains to the action and not ourselves. We may feel shame at the same time, but they are two different emotions. In short, guilt is how you feel about what you did and shame is how you feel about yourself.

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Consequences of knowledge hiding: The differential compensatory effects of guilt and shame

an article by Anne Burmeister (University of Bern, Switzerland), Ulrike Fasbender (University of Giessen, Germany) and Fabiola H. Gerpott (Technical University of Berlin, Germany) published in Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology Volume 92, Issue 2 (June 2019)

Abstract

The nature of the consequences of knowledge hiding, defined as an intentional attempt to withhold knowledge that has been requested, and the mechanisms through which knowledge hiding affects outcomes are undertheorized.

In this research, we propose that knowledge hiding can evoke guilt and shame in the knowledge hiding perpetrator. We zoom into the three types of knowledge hiding – evasive hiding, playing dumb, and rationalized hiding – and predict that the more deceptive knowledge hiding types, namely evasive hiding and playing dumb, evoke stronger feelings of guilt and shame than rationalized hiding.

We further argue that guilt and shame trigger differential emotion‐based reparatory mechanisms, such that guilt induces the motivation to correct one's transgressions through organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB), whereas shame induces the tendency to withdraw after hiding knowledge, as reflected in lower levels of OCB.

We test the proposed positive indirect relation between knowledge hiding and OCB via guilt, and the proposed negative indirect relation via shame in a scenario‐based experiment and a two‐wave field study. The studies provided support for most of our hypotheses.

We discuss how the proposed emotion pathway can facilitate nuanced theorizing about consequences of knowledge hiding for different types of negative emotions and subsequent compensatory work behaviours.

Practitioner points

• Hiding knowledge from colleagues can lead to experiences of guilt and shame. Playing dumb (in contrast to evasive hiding and rationalized hiding) in particular elicits these negative emotional experiences. Practitioners should therefore aim to prevent knowledge hiding, and especially playing dumb, in organizations.
• Guilt and shame elicit differential action tendencies in knowledge hiding perpetrators, which entails that negative emotions as a result of playing dumb can sometimes lead to positive behavioural consequences.
• To effectively manage the consequences of knowledge hiding, practitioners should try to elicit constructive negative emotions (guilt) rather than destructive emotions (shame) as a reaction to employees' knowledge hiding. This can facilitate employees' compensation for their transgressions through organizational citizenship behaviour, rather than withdrawal from the situation.

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5 Tips for Dealing with Guilt

a post by John M Grohol for the World of Psychology blog



Guilt has an incredible way of popping up even when we’re barely doing anything at all.

Most of us learn guilt throughout normal childhood development. Guilt clues us in when we’ve stepped outside the boundaries of our core values. It makes us take responsibility when we’ve done something wrong and helps us to develop a greater sense of self-awareness. The feeling of guilt forces us to examine how our behavior affects others and make changes so that we don’t make the same mistake again.

How can we learn to deal with guilt — accepting it when it is appropriate and letting it go when it’s unnecessary?

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3 Guilt And Shame Messages Of Childhood Emotional Neglect And How To Defeat Them

a post by Jonice Webb for Childhood Emotional Neglect blog [via World of Psychology]



Adults who were emotionally neglected in childhood can be quite perfectionistic and hard on themselves. But for many, it does not stop there.

Why? Because the messages of Childhood Emotional Neglect run deep. They go to the heart of the child, and stay with him for a lifetime. They not only damage his ability to understand and trust his own feelings, they damage his ability to understand and trust himself.

The messages of CEN are like invisible infusions of guilt and shame that happen every day in the life of the child.

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Negative emotions in informal feedback: The benefits of disappointment and drawbacks of anger

an article by Genevieve Johnson and Shane Connelly (University of Oklahoma, USA) published in Human Relations Volume 67 Number 10 (October 2014)

Abstract

Using the emotions as social information (EASI) model, this study investigated the emotional, attitudinal and behavioral reactions to failure feedback by manipulating negative emotional displays (angry, disappointed or none) and the position level and relational distance of the feedback source.

Undergraduate students (N = 260) responded to an organizational failure feedback vignette and completed a subsequent performance task.

Results demonstrated that guilt was the complementary emotional experience following displays of disappointment, while reciprocal anger followed displays of anger.

These emotional reactions served as important mediators between the emotional displays paired with the feedback message and participant responses of social behaviors, creative task performance and perceptions of the feedback source.

In addition, our findings indicated that negative emotions can have positive organizational and interpersonal outcomes. Guilt in response to disappointed displays resulted in beneficial behaviors and attitudes, while anger in response to angry displays was socially detrimental. The emotion displayed during feedback provision also served as a consistent contextual factor that did not interact with the position level or relational distance of the feedback source to impact behavioral and attitudinal reactions.

Overall, this study indicates that discrete negative emotions have unique social-functional properties that require further investigation.

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