A few Notes on Shame and Guilt and Embarrassment

Admittedly from Wiki as edited down by me, but it's interesting to me:


...Shame is a violation of cultural or social values while guilt feelings arise from violations of one's internal values. Thus, it's possible to feel ashamed of thought or behavior that no one knows about and to feel guilty about actions that gain the approval of others.

The experience of shame is directly about the self, the focus of evaluation. In guilt, the self is not the central object of negative evaluation, but rather the thing done is the focus. While guilt is a painful feeling of regret and responsibility for one's actions, shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person. Following this line of reasoning, shame is an acutely self-conscious state in which the self is split, imagining the self in the eyes of the other; by contrast, in guilt the self is unified.

On one view of the difference between shame and embarrassment, shame does not necessarily involve public humiliation while embarrassment does, that is, one can feel shame for an act known only to oneself but in order to be embarrassed one's actions must be revealed to others.

In the field of ethics (moral psychology, in particular), however, there is a debate as to whether shame involves recognition on the part of the ashamed that they have been judged negatively by others. Shame may carry the connotation of a response to something that is morally wrong whereas embarrassment is the response to something that is morally neutral but socially unacceptable. On another view of shame and embarrassment, the two emotions lie on a continuum and only differ in intensity...