The influences of shame and guilt emotions on cognitive processes

This study is to show how shame and guilt emotions affect perspective taking cognitive ability based on state and trait levels. Shame and guilt are the self-conscious emotions which appear as response to inappropriate situations in social contexts. Despite their similarities, they have different influences on cognition. This difference is explained as follows: shame causes to connect bad events to self and this makes it painful and damaging; but guilt causes to connect bad situation to immediate behavior, and this makes it less painful and beneficial. Also, this distinction between shame and guilt is emphasized in the same direction for both proneness and state levels. In the current research, perspective taking, strongly depends on self concept- was chosen as cognitive task in order to empirically test the different influences of these emotions on cognition at both proneness and state levels. Ninety female university students from Ege University participated in this study. As a result, it was found that shame has negative effects on perspective taking at both proneness and state levels. Also, it was found that proneness and state levels of shame has interaction effect on perspective taking. On the other hand, guilt was found as inefficient on perspective taking at proneness level. Also, it was found that at the state level, guilt has positive effect in respect to shame state whereas it has negative effect in respect to calm(neutral) state. Keywords: Shame, Guilt, Proneness, State, Perspective Taking