On the Measurement of Self-Conscious Emotions
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
On the Measurement of Self‑Conscious Emotions Paul Sungbae Park1 · Michael Lewis1 Accepted: 2 November 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Self-conscious emotions, like shame and pride, are thought to have an evaluative component in which the self is posited against a set of standards, rules, and goals of society. This study compares the two methods used to examine self-conscious emotions: a self-report questionnaire, the Test of Self-Conscious Affect in Children (TOSCA-C), and a direct observation of behaviors in response to particular tasks, developed by Lewis, Alessandri and Sullivan (1992). 126 young children participated in both tasks at ages 6 and 7. For the observation data, we found that the tendency to be self-evaluative in terms of success were not related to be self-evaluative in failure, and individual consistency across age was found for self-conscious emotions but not for the primary emotions. The questionnaire data showed that children who scored high in shame also scored high in failure, and there were no consistencies across age. There were weak, inconsistent associations between shame measured by the questionnaire technique and sadness observed in the experiment. Keywords Self-conscious emotions · Shame · Pride · Embarrassment
Introduction While much attention has been given to the measurement and study of early emotional development, mostly in the first years of life, little study has been given to the study of what Darwin called the self-conscious emotions [1]. In this paper we discuss the two major methods available for the study of these emotions, which include shame, guilt, embarrassment, and pride. Lewis has suggested that one difficulty in the study of these self-conscious emotions is that these emotions require elaborate evaluations and attributions of the self which in turn require more extensive cognitive abilities than the early emotions [2, 3]. For example, for these emotions to be elicited, children need to evaluate their behavior against their families’ standards, rules, and goals. They need to assume responsibility for their failure or success. Thus, for one child a C grade can be evaluated as success, while for another child the same C grade is evaluated as a failure. The fact
* Michael Lewis [email protected] 1
Department of Pediatrics, Institute for the Study of Child Development, Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, 89 French Street, Room 1208, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA
that these self-conscious emotions require self-attributions makes for part of their difficulty in being studied directly. Beside the difficulty of creating experimental situations, there is the issue of the measurement of these emotions. The measurement of these self-conscious emotions poses another challenge since these emotions are expressed behaviorally, not only through facial expression, but through body language as well. While Darwin used blushing as a measure of these emotions, the use of blushing has been augment
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