The “Royal” Negative Emotion

The “royal” Negative Emotion

[an Aukje Nauta article]

If one emotion deserves the stamp of ‘royal’, it is shame: it proves that we want to be a good person. Yet we usually push that painful feeling away. A shame, says organizational psychologist Aukje Nauta: ‘Shame teaches us something about our desires.’

As a child I had a type case. With cat statues, tiny cups and saucers and a gnome with a red pointed hat. The more colorful the figurines, the more beautiful I liked them.

My type case was half full, so I asked for ‘presents for the type case’ for my ninth birthday. My neighbor dutifully complied. He showed up with a tiny package with a bow tied around it.

I unpacked it and found a wooden block containing four steel weights of increasing size. There was no color to it. I thought it was ugly. So I said: ‘How ugly!’ After which my mother exclaimed in the midst of all the visitors: ‘Shame on you!’ and sent me to my room.

There I was, lying alone on my bed, sobbing, on my own birthday. When she picked me up a little later, I was forced to say sorry. Because, my mother said, ‘you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth’.

Shame is a common parenting tool worldwide. In this way, children ‘learn’ how things should be done and what standards they should meet.

In China, when a child whines the neighbor for candy, her mother says, “Xiu!” Xiu! Xiu!’ (three times ‘Shame on you’). She scratches her forehead with her finger, as a symbol of what happens when you do something naughty: your face gets damaged.

I also lost my face a bit in the type case incident. Although I learned ‘how it should be done’, at the moment itself the shame was especially painful.

Deviating from the norm

It is not without reason that shame is such a painful emotion. Behind it lies the fear that others will think you are crazy or strange, ridiculous or incompetent and will therefore reject you. That makes it primarily a social emotion: we are only ashamed of a blunder when others see it.

But it goes further than that. To avoid being corrected or rejected, we also constantly judge ourselves: do I think I am good, kind and helpful enough to be part of the group?

That also makes it a moral emotion: it makes you aware if something about you is not acceptable according to social norms or those of your social environment. And even when we deviate from the standards we impose on ourselves – such as taking ten thousand steps every day – this can be accompanied by shame, for example for our lack of self-discipline.

The gap we experience between who we are and who we want to be – a nice person who can do everything well – hurts. Shame researcher June Tangney calls shame an ugly feeling: we see it as an obstacle, a stumbling block.

That’s why we prefer to push them away. We don’t want to think about it and certainly don’t want to talk about it. While we could learn a lot from it if we did.

Because what we are ashamed of says something about what we find important, who we want to be and what we long for. And for those who really face their shame, it can even be an inspiration to improve themselves.

Well, time to look the beast in the mouth. To find out what we are ashamed of, we presented readers of Psychology Magazine with an online questionnaire – almost 900 people completed it, of which 88 percent were women and 12 percent were men. Let’s start lightheartedly.

[to be continued]

Contributed by Francis van Schaik

From Psychologie Magazine

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