Shame And Social Psychology

The present article aims to fill a gap resulted by narrow literature found on the topic of management and repair of shame and how social factors may influence that process. The background of the research lies on the phenomena, that shame is rather conceptualised in other researches as an element of individual psychopathology, perceived as shame-predisposition or internalized shame. This article intends to pay attention to shame and its management from the perspective social psychology as narrow research has been found on this topic. The authors do not make specific predictions in the subject article, there is no hypothesis proposed. The article has an inductive approach, the authors investigate specific personal experiences and they develop more comprehensive assumptions regarding handling …show more content…
The design of study is based on anonymous written narratives of shame related personal histories. Two main questions required the participants to answer freely in a broad way. These questions addressed to recall specifically the most current shameful situation in front of people, the second question requested the participants to detail the specific moment and the events happened before, after and during the given situation. Additionally short, open ended questions were asked in order to receive more valuable base for analysis. These 38 smaller questions aimed to explore the circumstances of the situation such as: connection with the parties involved, effort taken in order to decrease the feeling of shame, physical and emotional sensation occurred, feedback from others. The participants were recruited from a British University, 42 participants were students, eight participants were employed by the institute. The response rate was relatively low as 1550 initial e-mails were distributed requesting for taking part in the research and only 96 participants returned the questionnaire and leading to the final number of 50