Authors
Jochim Hansen, Anna Khvorost, Marijana Zimonjic, Claudia Schoosleitner
Published in
Cognition & emotion. Pages 1-17. Jul 14, 2025. Epub Jul 14, 2025.
Abstract
Shame and guilt are social emotions that share several similarities. However, there are important differences between these two emotions: Shame relates to the whole self and involves more global appraisal tendencies, whereas guilt relates to a specific behaviour. Therefore, shame may be a more high-level emotion than guilt. Considering construal-level theory and the construal-matching hypothesis, we hypothesised that a high-level construal of one's transgression would more likely result in shame than guilt compared to a low-level construal. We investigated this hypothesis with two studies that experimentally manipulated the level at which transgressions were construed using different methods: the category-versus-exemplar task (Study 1) and focusing on the how or the why of diverse transgressions (Study 2). We tested whether these manipulations affected shame versus guilt. Study 1 provided only correlational support, whereas Study 2 provided causal support for our hypothesis. Study 2 additionally showed that construal level affected downstream consequences in particular: A high-level construal caused relatively more hide and escape tendencies than a low-level construal. Implications of these findings are discussed.
PMID:
40659019
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 15 Jul 2025.
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