Through Benevolent Eyes: the Differential Efficacy of Perspective Taking and Cognitive Reappraisal on the Regulation of
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Through Benevolent Eyes: the Differential Efficacy of Perspective Taking and Cognitive Reappraisal on the Regulation of Shame Govind Krishnamoorthy 1 & Penelope Davis 2 & Analise O’Donovan 2 & Brett McDermott 3 & Amy Mullens 1 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Difficulties in regulating feelings of shame is a risk factor for the onset and recurrence of mental health disorders. The present research investigated the impact of the individual differences in propensity to experience shame (or shame-proneness) on two emotion regulation strategies—perspective taking and positive reappraisal. A total of 228 participants, undergraduate students, were allocated randomly to one of the eight experimental conditions. The results revealed that for high shame-prone participants, the use of perspective taking, without positive reappraisal, led to a heightened experience of shame. In contrast, the combination of perspective taking and positive reappraisal led to reductions in shame among high shame-prone participants. The findings highlight the relationship between individual differences, and the separate and combined effects of affect regulation strategies on the experience of shame. Keywords Shame . Negative self-evaluations . Reappraisal . Perspective taking . Emotion
regulation
Introduction Individuals who have difficulty effectively managing negative emotional responses to daily life stressors may be at increased risk of developing mental health disorders such as depression (e.g. Sloan et al. 2017; Sheppes et al. 2015). Such findings have illuminated the need for a richer understanding of the emotional phenomenology of * Govind Krishnamoorthy [email protected]
1
University of Southern Queensland, 11 Salisbury Road, Ipswich, Queensland 4305, Australia
2
Griffith University, 176 Messines Ridge Road, Mount Gravatt, Queensland 4122, Australia
3
James Cook University, James Cook Drive, Douglas, Queensland 4814, Australia
International Journal of Cognitive Therapy
mental health conditions and investigations of the role of specific emotions. One emotion that has been the subject of extensive research is shame. Shame is commonly defined as an intense negative emotion characterized by the perception of a global devaluation of the self (Tangney and Dearing 2003). Shame has been conceptualized as being fundamentally different from other emotions, such as guilt, as it results from attributing information about a specific situation to characterological defects (e.g. a person feeling ashamed may think, ‘I am bad’) rather than to situational factors (e.g. a person feeling guilty may think, ‘I did something bad’) (Lewis 1987, p. 42). The inability to regulate feelings of shame is a significant risk factor for the onset and recurrence of depression (Kim et al. 2011), anxiety (Fergus et al. 2010), suicide (Wiklander et al. 2012), post-traumatic stress disorder (Cunningham et al. 2019), addictions (Potter-Efron and Bruce 2014), eating disorders (Duarte and PintoGouveia 2017), personality disorders (Peters
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