The Social Sources of Anticipated Shame and Guilt

• In Event: Emotions, Social Rewards and Offending

Abstract

Delinquency is not merely action, it is essentially infraction (Matza, 1964, p.182). It’s a violation of legally/socially proscribed rules, marking out conduct which is deemed to be (morally) impermissible. Delinquency cannot be fully understood without taking this normative context into account (Bottoms, 2002). One way to get more insight into the moral significance of youth delinquency is to look at youngster’s (anticipated) feelings of shame and guilt. Shame and guilt are both self-conscious emotions that can arise from different types of transgressions or shortcomings. To feel them, youngsters must at least have a sense of (1) self, (2) their relation to (significant) others and (3) the standards and rules that prevail in a certain group or society as a whole. Both emotions are therefore inherently social. Most studies of youth delinquency overlook this central feature of these emotions. They reduce (anticipated) shame and guilt too much to individual dispositions, to be used as predictors in regression analyses of self-reported delinquency. First, we discuss some theories that can give us more insight into the social nature of anticipated shame and guilt. Second, we test some hypotheses derived from these theories using a sample of 4000 Belgian youngsters aged 12 to 18.

Author

• Arne De Boeck, University of Leuven