April 2, 2015 • 29 mins
Shame is a powerful emotion that, depending on the way you frame it, can be a force for either good or evil. Find out what the difference is between embarrassment, guilt and shame. Do dogs feel shame? And have you ever suffered from second-hand embarrassment?
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
you know, we, uh, we all have a lot of
ideas about what Shane is. Certain images come to mind
from our own life, from the world of fiction. But
(00:26):
but we're here to tell you the shame uh is
spider Man. Shame is spider Man. And let's explain that.
Let's unpack that because there were that there was an experiment,
all right, Yeah, Indeed, two thousand thirteen study published in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They took
more than seven hundred persisipents from Finland, Sweden, and Taiwan,
(00:49):
and they had them view emotion laden words, videos, facial expressions,
and stories. And then the Protestants self reported areas of
their bodies that felt diff print following the exposure. So
then they take they took this information and they used
to create computer generated silhouettes with the areas colored to
(01:09):
no areas of increased bodily sensation like red yellows and
oranges and decreased cold blues. Okay, so the aim here
was to map bodily sensations in connection with specific emotions,
and it ends up looking like an infrared image. By
the way it does. It looks like straight up infrared
predator imagery of of human body. But but it's not created.
(01:32):
That was created through self reporting, and really they're quite
interesting looking. Do check it out. Will include a link
to the study on the landing page for this episode. Yeah,
you should check it out. Because all of those emotions
are represented on the body, and the only emotion that
is a full bodied emotion that self reported is happiness,
which I think is not too surprising, right, um, But
(01:55):
the one that we are focusing on today, shame, Well,
it's represent ended in a way that the person the
silhouette kind of looks like Spider Man, indeed. Yeah. Whereas
happiness is like bright yellow face, yellow chest, and then
red over the rest of the body, Shame is uh,
mostly dark body, but also some red on the chest,
(02:17):
red face, and then these big sort of almond shaped
yellow blotches right where our cheeks would be. But they
really do look like the large, low almond shaped eyes
of everyone's favorite comic book Web Slinger. Now, this was
observed by a comment er on the the actual article,
which we thought was pretty clever. So we're like, yeah, shame,
(02:39):
shame does look like Spider Man in the body when
it's expressed. And anxiety, by the way, to me, looks
like dark Maul. Let's see, let's see whiche is anxiety? Yeah, yeah,
I'm getting a definite dark Maul kind of quality off
of that, kind of like streaks on the cheeks there. Yeah,
Sadness looks a little bit like um, like that painting
the the screen, you know. Well, yeah, I thought that too,
(03:02):
and I thought, yeah, that is suddness. Although the scream
I think it's supposed to be some sort of existential terror. Uh,
that's also sad too. Sadness also kind of looks, you know,
unsurprisingly like the ghost character on Yogaba Gabba Google. Google. Yeah,
it looks kind of like Google. I can't believe we
know that. All right, So obviously we're talking about shame today. Uh,
(03:25):
you know that that particular feeling that is evoked when say,
your grandmother says something like shema and you, Julie Douglas,
shema on you. Right. Um, there, there's a whole boatload
of stuff associated with shame. But first we should probably
define it. Yeah, and in this we get into the
basic meat of shame and guilt. They're often thought off
(03:48):
sort of that's the same thing, but they're different. They're
they're they're quite different, and it's just really important. Like
a lot hinges on this. Yes, So what's guilt? Right?
When do you feel guilt? You feel guilt when you
you have remorse for something you did, a specific crime,
specific action. There's this thing that you did and you're like, ah,
(04:08):
I did that, that that sucks, I'm sorry that I
did it. But then you have shame. And shame is
a little different. Shame is if it's attached to an action,
then it's more like, I can't believe I'm the type
of person who would do that. It's the painful feeling
that arises from the consciousness of something dishonorable, improfitable, improfitable.
(04:29):
It's it's it's almost more tied to there's something wrong
with me. There's a fault in me, not a fault
in mere merely in my actions. Yeah. Sociologist burn A
Brown says, in the simplest term, shame is about who
we are, not what we've done. It's often lasting devastating
and makes us feel abnormal and alone. And she gives
some examples of her own research into this. When she's
(04:53):
looking at the difference between guilt and shame, says, guilt
is I did something bad. Shame is I am bad
or I made a flawed to decision or I am flawed.
So you see the pattern there. Yeah, there are fundamental
differences here that will will definitely pull apart in this episode, right,
and we're gonna talk about how powerful this emotion is shame,
(05:13):
I mean, how we can actually dictate the path of
your life and how you operate out in the world.
But first we have to look at one of shame's
calling cards, also guilt and embarrassments calling cards blushing. And
we'll look at Papa Darwin here, who in the Expression
of Emotions and Man and Animals, which he wrote in
(05:35):
eighteen seventy two, looked at the movements of expression in
the face and the body, and was particularly interested in blushing.
He said it is the most peculiar and the most
human of all expressions. Now, Darwin suspected that blushing had
to do with how we appear to others. He wrote,
mental states which induced blushing consists of shyness, shame, the modesty,
(05:59):
the essentially element in all being self attention. It is
not the simple act of reflecting on our own appearance,
but the thinking of what others think of us, which
excites a blush, and he was onto something there. Um.
He also felt like the blushing was directly related to
the part of the body that the person was thinking
(06:19):
of or thought was being observed. In part, he thought
this because he was looking at a physicians account of
a woman who when she disrobed and her chest area
began to blush in her chest area. Now he was
taking his cues mostly from physicians accounts because he wasn't
going around making people blushing and gathering a bunch of data,
(06:41):
So that's where he was collecting some of his thoughts from.
And he also thought that blushing could have been genetic,
like this idea that the more your ancestors blushed, the
more robust it would show up or be selected for
in yourself. Um. That is this the full pick? Sure? No, um.
(07:02):
And in fact Darwin didn't distinguish between embarrassment and guilt
and shame um to try to get to the reasons
for blushing. He just kind of lumped them all in
one big pool. Um. In eighteen seventy one, he wrote
to his friend H. Wedgewood. He said, I wish I
had said more about shame, an awfully complex subject where
(07:26):
no two persons would ever quite agree, and I hardly
expect anyone will agree with me. But as yet I
naw my colors to the past. In other words, here's
what I've figured out so far about shame and blushing,
and I don't think it's the full picture, you know.
And indeed the full picture is still kind of lacking today,
even though there's been a lot more study since that time. Um,
(07:48):
you know, with blushing, we're we're again. We're talking about
the involuntary reddening of a person's face due to emo
emotional stress. That might be anxiety, it could be romance, anger, embarrassment,
and of course shame. Now the questions arise, though, of course,
um you know exactly, you know, how is it coming
about physiologically? What are there different types of blushes? Uh?
(08:10):
You know, we observe things like the mere awareness of
a blush can cause it to increase. Being told that
you're blushing when you're not can cause the blush to
manifest um and and and certainly mileage varies from person
to person. We can we can all think of people
who blush more easily than others. Um. But scientists have asked,
is a blush a single phenomenon or are there different
(08:31):
kinds of blushing? Like how do you make sense of
the fact that you have like that sudden blush, like
like oops, did something embarrassing? Oops, I'm really shamed. Just
total red face versus the creeping blush that might manifest,
you know, slowly during the course of a presentation or
a speech or an increasingly intense conversation. As a psychologist
(08:54):
Ray Kroizer points out, it's an it's an understuddied area.
It's an understudied area of human expression. Part of this
is big. The blush is difficult to measure, even with
our modern tools, even with you know, thermal sensors and cameras. Uh.
The fleeting blush, especially like the micro expression of blushes,
is very difficult to study. And the physiology of the
blush itself is really a complex tapestry that involves the
(09:17):
sympathetic nervous system and its regulation. It involves uh brandy
kinon of compound released in the blood in some circumstances
that causes contraction of smooth muscles and the dilation of
blood vessels. Histamine, nitric oxide, and a number of other
combined factors uh and plus you can throw into the
into and you can also throw into the mix that
(09:40):
there are plenty of other things that can make your
face flush, not only emotions, but you know, hot flashes, exercises,
sexual arousal, um, you name it. Well, there's also the
kind of blush that can arise when you do have
attention directed towards you. But it's pleasurable, right, Maybe it's
some sort of positive experience in your blushing, but it
(10:00):
then can become negative because you're called out for it.
So there's a changeability to blushing. Um. And there there
are a ton of different kinds as you say that
we haven't really gotten to the bottom of, and a
bunch of different sources for blushing. But I think most
people can relate to a blushing related to unwanted attention
(10:22):
at one time or another in your life. Right. And
in order to get to the depths of the self
conscious blush, there was a study conducted by Peter D.
Drummond and Nadia Mirco. This was published in the March
two thousand and four edition of Psychotherapy, with the paper
uh titled staring at one side of the face increases
(10:46):
blood flow on that side of the face. Okay, so
let's figure out what they did here, because I think
that gives you a clue to at least one of
their methods. The setup is this. They had twenty eight
participants who were asked to either sing out loud or
read out loud. Robert, what would your preference be? It
(11:06):
comes down to who's uh, who's watching? You know, I'm
going to be more comfortable reading. But but singing is
a different a different situation entirely. It's a different experience,
a different communication, a different expression of yourself. Uh. Right,
Reading is more it's a normative thing, right, Like you're
talking right now. You can read at the same pace.
There's not a lot of difference there. But singing out
(11:29):
of context, like when you're not on a stage really
kind of uh draws a lot of attention, right, says, Hey,
look at me doing something totally weird out of context. Um.
So that's why they chose this, and this is what
they found. Increases in cheek temperature were greater on the
observed than the unobserved side during both tasks. Okay, changes
(11:51):
in cheek temperature were symmetrical when the experiment or sat
next to another twenty three participants and looked straight ahead,
as well when the experiment or stared at one side
of participants face through a glass window while the participants
would sing. However, increases in cutaneous blood flow were greater
on the observed and the unobserved side of the forehead
(12:13):
during singing. Okay, there's more blushing going on on one
side of the face. Um, So I think that gives
you a bit of a clue as to that unwanted
attention and how it would act on the body. Okay,
And of course, as we were discussing before we came
into record, I imagine this this may differ depending on
(12:34):
how musical one's family upbringing is, or how how prone
one is to break into song in their daily life. Right,
if you were really off key, perhaps you would have
a scarlet blush, which might even be sort of saying
I apologize. And indeed, that's a whole other argument that
that blushing is a signal to your fellow. Your fellow
(12:54):
primates to to communicate something. Uh. Now, when it comes
to primate it's it's worth noting and I think I've
mentioned this in the past when you when you look
at social and non social primates, the non social ones,
the loners, that's where you tend to find the really
crazy looking uh, primate faces, that's where you see, you know,
a whole lot of colors and and uh and and
(13:17):
and and just crazy stuff going on, you know, like
really the eye catching primates. But the social primates, those
are the ones that are gonna have the planer faces,
the place that the faces that there's less remarkable coloration
going on. And that's because the face, as with humans,
is essentially um a communications array. You know, it's for
the use of expressions and micro expressions to communicate what
(13:41):
you're feeling and what you're about to do to those
around you. And so the argument here is that the
blush is pretty much the same. Now, if it is,
then what is a blush saying? Well? According to clinical
psychologist and author Robert J. Edelman has done a lot
of work with blushing and shame, He says that it's
essentially saying, hey, I'm sorry, I'm at fault. I understand
(14:02):
the gravity of what has happened, I empathize. In short,
it's signaling that the blushers uh. In short, it signals
the blushers adherence to societal norms and acknowledges failure, communicates
appeasement and a nonverbal apology. Um, which which I think
matches up with a lot of a lot of our
experiences of shame, you know. Yeah. And I'm just curious
(14:25):
to know what sort of circumstances cause you to blush. Um. Well,
I was thinking about this earlier when you're talking about
like positive comments making one blush, Like I I do
feel like I experienced that if someone says something nice
about me in the presence of others, I get that
kind of uncomfortable blush, even though I'm receiving positive feedback.
(14:47):
It's kind of an embarrassment thing. I mean, it's not shame, right,
you know, it's not a shame. It must be that
attention thing, you know, it's um and uh yeah. And
in terms of like straight up shameful blushing, I so
I do blush about Let's say, if I forget to
you know, do something, you know, around the house, and
it's like, oh, well, that's you know, like I said,
(15:07):
I forgot to clean the cat box or something, you know,
Like I might blush when I admit that, because it's like, ah,
not only did I not clean out the cat box,
I'm the type of person who forgets to the cat
box that's pooping it, um, you know, which is a
little bit of guilt and shame with that. Yeah, because
I'm I'm a pretty you know, because I guess it
kind of ties into, you know, how I view myself
and how I want other people to view me. So
I view myself as the type of person who wouldn't
(15:30):
let the cat poop build up your cat box cleaner exactly.
So if I if I deviate from that, like that's
like a fault in me. So, yeah, I've thought of
it before, and it for me oddly, it's when someone
makes some sort of sexual innuendo. I'm not necessarily embarrassed
at that. In fact, I'm usually the first person to
do that. It makes some sort of you know, sexual
(15:51):
innuendo joke. But if someone else says it, then for
whatever reason, I yeah, where you're just you're it's almost
like you're you're embarrassed for other people or you're well,
I mean even if it's like you're privy to the joke,
so you were in the culture of the joke, you're
you're among your fellow primates, and this is the subject
(16:12):
matter on the table, you know. Yeah, we actually got
a great email about this. It's called second hand embarrassment. Yeah,
I mean that ties in directly to what we're talking
about here, But embarrassment it's again its own category. It
doesn't have these long ranging effects that shame does. Before
we get into the deterrent side of shame or potential uses,
I do want to point out a couple of quick
(16:33):
stats here. One study found that of those polls that
they never blushed alone, which is interesting and it kind
of backs up the idea that it's about communicating and
being observed. But then you already mentioned like blushing, um
while writing engage in a solitary act. So yeah, we
(16:53):
were talking about this earlier that sometimes from the effort
of writing, especially from writing some piece of fiction, that
I come out USh cheeked and blushing. Yeah. And oh
and I also want to point out that there was
a two thousand nine study that found that people who
blush due to some violation are seeing less negatively eve
they blush, So uh, the idea of being that that
(17:14):
again we're potentially communicating authentic shame over something. And then
when when we receive that signal from another of our
fellow primates, we say, oh, well, they're really sorry, they
really feel bad about it, So I'm going to be
less hard on them because there's the blush. Well, and
that's an aspect of vulnerability to write. All right, So
(17:34):
if you want to learn more about blushing, do check
out Josh Clark's article why do people Blush? It's really excellent. Um. Now,
when we talk about shame versus guilt as a deterrent um,
we've got some interesting findings here, especially if you start
to think about your mom, what her her modus operandi
was growing up to she shamey or did she guilt you?
(17:56):
Because because one is far more effective in the other. Um.
And this sort of power of shaming, by the way,
goes back way way far right, because um, there there
is a power to it. It dates back at least
to the stockades of colonial times here in the United States.
But the question then becomes does public shaming work as
(18:18):
a deterrent to crimes or even unwanted behaviors and George
Mason psychologist June technique. She wanted to answer those questions.
She suspected that shame would be less effective than guilt
in deterring for future crime. So think of the example
of guilt equals I did something bad, right in Shane
equals I am bad. Okay. Now, what she did is
(18:40):
she recruited more than four hundred inmates at a local jail,
all recently incarcerated on felony charges. She administered a standard
assessment to identify which inmates were prone to guilt feeling
feelings or shame feelings, and it also identified those who
most who were most likely to blame others for their problems,
(19:01):
because that's key here too. Then the inmates served their
time and they were released. About a year after the release,
Tagni and her colleagues followed up to see how they
were doing, and they used several different measurements, including self
reports and public reports, to come up with a recidivism
score for each inmate. And by recidivism, what we mean
here is a relapse into criminal behavior that might land
(19:24):
them in jail again. Yeah, So her prediction was that
shame from intimates would be more likely to return to
crime after they were released, and her initial findings seemed
to support this. Shame seemed to cause former inmates to
blame others for their misfortune, leading to to to repeat crimes,
but those who felt guilty were less likely to repeat
(19:44):
their crimes a year out. So again placed directly into
do you do you feel like you're actually guilty or
is it something deeper? Right? But but then further study
revealed that this is a little more complicated than that.
UH found that shame led to is m only when
the humiliated inmates blamed others, but when shamed individuals accepted
(20:06):
the blame themselves, they didn't suffer an increase in recidivism.
So in some cases we can see shame might hold
you back. Other times it could give you a certain
amount of strength to give you a springboard to make
some changes. UM. One of the key ways here UH
that the technique points out is that shame can make
(20:27):
you withdrawal from others, and it kind of depends on
who you're withdrawing from whether that's a good move or bad.
So if you means you're when withdrawing from enablers, from
other criminals, from addicts, well then that might be a
step in the right direction. That kind of with withdrawing,
withdrawing from people would give be like a springboard for change.
On the other hand, if you're withdrawing from positive influences,
(20:49):
if you're withdrawing from family in people that you feel
ashamed in the presence of, or you're withdrawing from other
important UH structures in your life. Say say church is important,
you end up withdrawing from church because you're ashamed of
what you did. If you're withdrawing from you know, other
other resources that could help you out, then that's that's
bad news. You just go into that that shame spiral
(21:10):
away from the UH, the the latter that could pull
you up. That's right, And particularly if you're withdrawing because
you blame that person or that institution or that thing.
And we see parallels with the study and alcoholism. Dr
Tony Webb, who holds a PhD in trans disciplinary research
(21:32):
at the University of West Sydney, has has looked into
this and he says that internally generated shame turns into
shaming something done to us that violates our sense of
the fair go and not unnaturally we tend to react
against this by attacking others, um blaming as as we discussed,
hiding as we also discussed and hiding from ourselves, he says.
(21:55):
And so this plays into a kind of social and
ecological apathy, as he says, and a wide range of
addictive behaviors have a common root, and what he says
is unacknowledged shame. So let's look at a study here
that looks a bit more into It's from two thousand
and thirteen from the Clinical Psychological Science by Jessica Tracy
(22:20):
and Daniel Randall's of the University of British Columbia, and
they looked at drinking and health outcomes and a sample
of newly sober recovering alcoholics. They used measures that assessed
both self reported shame and shame related behaviors. And these
this becomes really important by the way the self reported
versus the behavior. So the behavior might be a narrow
(22:42):
chest and slumping shoulders, and the researchers took that information
and they hypothesized that participants would be less able to
voluntarily control their behavioral displays of shame and that would
be their tell. So in the first session, participants were
asked to describe the last time that they drank and
they felt badly about it, and the responses were videotaped
(23:04):
by the researchers. In a second session about four months later,
participants were asked to report their drinking behaviors and they
completed questionnaires about their physical and mental health at both
of these sessions. Now Here are the findings people who
displayed more shame related behavior were likely to be in
were more likely to be in poor physical health at
(23:25):
the time of their first session. But more surprising, though,
was the finding that behavioral displays of shame predicted whether
participants would relapse after the first session, not the self
reported but the way they were behaving with their their
body postures and Tracy and Randall says how much shame
participants displayed strongly predicted not only whether they relapsed, but
(23:48):
how bad that relapse was. That is, how many drinks
they had if they did relapse. So they could take
that information, they could take this, this outward expression of
shame through the body and predict whether or not that
person would would fall into say that recidivism, so to speak,
of alcoholism, that relapse. It's interesting this uh reminds me
(24:12):
a little bit of the implicit association tests that we
discussed in our last episode, you know about weeding out
are self reported UM ideas about self and others versus
what we're feeling and and what and what we're thinking
below cognition, right. I mean this requires you to identify
your feelings is either shame or guilt in order to
(24:36):
begin to understand how to change the behavior, right, because
if you're unaware of it, you have an implicit bias,
right that's working under the cover about how how this
shame is manifesting in yourself. Um. And so that's that
would be one of the things that that you would
have to confront if you wanted to change yourself, because
(24:57):
if you think I am this, I am a bad
person as opposed to I have exhibited some bad behaviors. Well,
that's the difference between change and just staying mired in
that mindset. Indeed, and this this all stacks up really
well with UH what I was reading from University of
Alberta researcher Jessica van Villet UH two thousand nine study
(25:20):
where she looked at positive shame and problematic shame, which
you know we've been discussing here on the positive level,
of shame can be that springboard. It can it can
force us to make changes that that that help us
to protect our relationships and preserve that fabric of society.
Again getting into that idea that that we feel shame
and because we've fallen out of step with societal norms. Uh.
(25:42):
But then there's the problematic shame where you know, the
shame spy or withdrawing from others, withdrawing from the very
things you need to pull yourself out of the pit. Right.
And her research shows that people who feel debilitated by
shame tend to again internalize and over personalized that since
the situation and uh, and they seem to feel like
they cannot change things, they cannot pull things around. Uh.
(26:06):
So she has a few suggestions here that I think
are are very valid and really stack up well we've
been discussing here. She says, step back from the problem
and view the picture in a different light. She says,
possibly identify external factors that contribute to your actions or situation,
break the hopelessness, and realize that there are steps you
can take to make things right again and make connections
(26:28):
to people, uh, individuals, to humanity itself or even even
in some cases depending on your particular worldview to a
higher power or a more noble idea, you know. And
I think this is particularly important in this the sort
of environment that we are in historically with the Internet culture,
there is a lot of shaming, right, and so we're
(26:52):
absorbing the on subconscious levels. And so I think that
you even have to uh cultivate an awareness and that
aspect too. It's not just your own behaviors or how
you operate in the world, but the kind of stuff
that you are exposing yourself to you or even participating
in virtually online. And I'm talking about dog shaming here. Oh,
(27:13):
you're talking about the someone's dog has done something bad
like knock over a plant, and then they essentially show
them ashamed with a sign that says I knocked over
my master's potted plant. Yes, there are a lot of
dog shaming sites, including dog shaming dot com. And just
as you said, it could be like a dog looking
sort of, you know, like it's been reproached and it's
(27:34):
got those baleful eyes, and it might say I tried
to make a sandwich, but I don't know how, and
then it's got a bunch of pieces of bread stacked
up on its head because they because they've as we've
discussed in u in some of our past episodes about
dog and human relationships, they take on that submissive pose
which we often project shame and apology and always feels
(27:55):
sad over what he did, when in reality, it's it's submission.
It is And um, if if you want to know
more about that, that episode is really interesting. UM. I
think it's called Your Dog Doesn't Love You, but it
talks about the coevolution of humans and dogs and how
dogs eye tracking evolved with humans because it was so
important for them to try to clue into what we
(28:16):
wanted from them and what we were thinking so that
they could get the scraps of food from us. Yeah,
of course it's interesting to think back on that and
then look at this episode where we dismantle a human
display of emotion and uh and when you when you
start really taking it apart, like is it that different
from the from this display of obedience and submission on
(28:37):
the part of the dog that we classify as as
being who I'm sorry, And then we're talking about blood
vessels welling up in the face and it's basically saying, oh,
I stepped out of line. It's it's in a way,
it's kind of its own uh signal of submission. The
difference here, though, is the dog is not saying I
am a bad dog. I mean the dogs like, all right,
what do I need to do to get to that treat?
(28:59):
What sort of Oh you want the bailful eyes? Okay,
here you go, there you go. Yeah, the human human
complexity changes everything. All right? Well, hey, you want to
check out dog shaming, You want to check out that
episode on whether your dog Loves You? You can find
all of that on the landing page for this episode.
(29:20):
And that is it's Stuffable your mind dot com. That's
the mother ship. That's where we find all of our videos,
podcast episodes, blog post, you name it. And if you
have feedback on this on guilt shame, embarrassment um, you
can send us an email at blow the Mind at
house to forks dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot
(29:43):
com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
you know, we, uh, we all have a lot of
ideas about what Shane is. Certain images come to mind
from our own life, from the world of fiction. But
(00:26):
but we're here to tell you the shame uh is
spider Man. Shame is spider Man. And let's explain that.
Let's unpack that because there were that there was an experiment,
all right, Yeah, Indeed, two thousand thirteen study published in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They took
more than seven hundred persisipents from Finland, Sweden, and Taiwan,
(00:49):
and they had them view emotion laden words, videos, facial expressions,
and stories. And then the Protestants self reported areas of
their bodies that felt diff print following the exposure. So
then they take they took this information and they used
to create computer generated silhouettes with the areas colored to
(01:09):
no areas of increased bodily sensation like red yellows and
oranges and decreased cold blues. Okay, so the aim here
was to map bodily sensations in connection with specific emotions,
and it ends up looking like an infrared image. By
the way it does. It looks like straight up infrared
predator imagery of of human body. But but it's not created.
(01:32):
That was created through self reporting, and really they're quite
interesting looking. Do check it out. Will include a link
to the study on the landing page for this episode. Yeah,
you should check it out. Because all of those emotions
are represented on the body, and the only emotion that
is a full bodied emotion that self reported is happiness,
which I think is not too surprising, right, um, But
(01:55):
the one that we are focusing on today, shame, Well,
it's represent ended in a way that the person the
silhouette kind of looks like Spider Man, indeed. Yeah. Whereas
happiness is like bright yellow face, yellow chest, and then
red over the rest of the body, Shame is uh,
mostly dark body, but also some red on the chest,
(02:17):
red face, and then these big sort of almond shaped
yellow blotches right where our cheeks would be. But they
really do look like the large, low almond shaped eyes
of everyone's favorite comic book Web Slinger. Now, this was
observed by a comment er on the the actual article,
which we thought was pretty clever. So we're like, yeah, shame,
(02:39):
shame does look like Spider Man in the body when
it's expressed. And anxiety, by the way, to me, looks
like dark Maul. Let's see, let's see whiche is anxiety? Yeah, yeah,
I'm getting a definite dark Maul kind of quality off
of that, kind of like streaks on the cheeks there. Yeah,
Sadness looks a little bit like um, like that painting
the the screen, you know. Well, yeah, I thought that too,
(03:02):
and I thought, yeah, that is suddness. Although the scream
I think it's supposed to be some sort of existential terror. Uh,
that's also sad too. Sadness also kind of looks, you know,
unsurprisingly like the ghost character on Yogaba Gabba Google. Google. Yeah,
it looks kind of like Google. I can't believe we
know that. All right, So obviously we're talking about shame today. Uh,
(03:25):
you know that that particular feeling that is evoked when say,
your grandmother says something like shema and you, Julie Douglas,
shema on you. Right. Um, there, there's a whole boatload
of stuff associated with shame. But first we should probably
define it. Yeah, and in this we get into the
basic meat of shame and guilt. They're often thought off
(03:48):
sort of that's the same thing, but they're different. They're
they're they're quite different, and it's just really important. Like
a lot hinges on this. Yes, So what's guilt? Right?
When do you feel guilt? You feel guilt when you
you have remorse for something you did, a specific crime,
specific action. There's this thing that you did and you're like, ah,
(04:08):
I did that, that that sucks, I'm sorry that I
did it. But then you have shame. And shame is
a little different. Shame is if it's attached to an action,
then it's more like, I can't believe I'm the type
of person who would do that. It's the painful feeling
that arises from the consciousness of something dishonorable, improfitable, improfitable.
(04:29):
It's it's it's almost more tied to there's something wrong
with me. There's a fault in me, not a fault
in mere merely in my actions. Yeah. Sociologist burn A
Brown says, in the simplest term, shame is about who
we are, not what we've done. It's often lasting devastating
and makes us feel abnormal and alone. And she gives
some examples of her own research into this. When she's
(04:53):
looking at the difference between guilt and shame, says, guilt
is I did something bad. Shame is I am bad
or I made a flawed to decision or I am flawed.
So you see the pattern there. Yeah, there are fundamental
differences here that will will definitely pull apart in this episode, right,
and we're gonna talk about how powerful this emotion is shame,
(05:13):
I mean, how we can actually dictate the path of
your life and how you operate out in the world.
But first we have to look at one of shame's
calling cards, also guilt and embarrassments calling cards blushing. And
we'll look at Papa Darwin here, who in the Expression
of Emotions and Man and Animals, which he wrote in
(05:35):
eighteen seventy two, looked at the movements of expression in
the face and the body, and was particularly interested in blushing.
He said it is the most peculiar and the most
human of all expressions. Now, Darwin suspected that blushing had
to do with how we appear to others. He wrote,
mental states which induced blushing consists of shyness, shame, the modesty,
(05:59):
the essentially element in all being self attention. It is
not the simple act of reflecting on our own appearance,
but the thinking of what others think of us, which
excites a blush, and he was onto something there. Um.
He also felt like the blushing was directly related to
the part of the body that the person was thinking
(06:19):
of or thought was being observed. In part, he thought
this because he was looking at a physicians account of
a woman who when she disrobed and her chest area
began to blush in her chest area. Now he was
taking his cues mostly from physicians accounts because he wasn't
going around making people blushing and gathering a bunch of data,
(06:41):
So that's where he was collecting some of his thoughts from.
And he also thought that blushing could have been genetic,
like this idea that the more your ancestors blushed, the
more robust it would show up or be selected for
in yourself. Um. That is this the full pick? Sure? No, um.
(07:02):
And in fact Darwin didn't distinguish between embarrassment and guilt
and shame um to try to get to the reasons
for blushing. He just kind of lumped them all in
one big pool. Um. In eighteen seventy one, he wrote
to his friend H. Wedgewood. He said, I wish I
had said more about shame, an awfully complex subject where
(07:26):
no two persons would ever quite agree, and I hardly
expect anyone will agree with me. But as yet I
naw my colors to the past. In other words, here's
what I've figured out so far about shame and blushing,
and I don't think it's the full picture, you know.
And indeed the full picture is still kind of lacking today,
even though there's been a lot more study since that time. Um,
(07:48):
you know, with blushing, we're we're again. We're talking about
the involuntary reddening of a person's face due to emo
emotional stress. That might be anxiety, it could be romance, anger, embarrassment,
and of course shame. Now the questions arise, though, of course,
um you know exactly, you know, how is it coming
about physiologically? What are there different types of blushes? Uh?
(08:10):
You know, we observe things like the mere awareness of
a blush can cause it to increase. Being told that
you're blushing when you're not can cause the blush to
manifest um and and and certainly mileage varies from person
to person. We can we can all think of people
who blush more easily than others. Um. But scientists have asked,
is a blush a single phenomenon or are there different
(08:31):
kinds of blushing? Like how do you make sense of
the fact that you have like that sudden blush, like
like oops, did something embarrassing? Oops, I'm really shamed. Just
total red face versus the creeping blush that might manifest,
you know, slowly during the course of a presentation or
a speech or an increasingly intense conversation. As a psychologist
(08:54):
Ray Kroizer points out, it's an it's an understuddied area.
It's an understudied area of human expression. Part of this
is big. The blush is difficult to measure, even with
our modern tools, even with you know, thermal sensors and cameras. Uh.
The fleeting blush, especially like the micro expression of blushes,
is very difficult to study. And the physiology of the
blush itself is really a complex tapestry that involves the
(09:17):
sympathetic nervous system and its regulation. It involves uh brandy
kinon of compound released in the blood in some circumstances
that causes contraction of smooth muscles and the dilation of
blood vessels. Histamine, nitric oxide, and a number of other
combined factors uh and plus you can throw into the
into and you can also throw into the mix that
(09:40):
there are plenty of other things that can make your
face flush, not only emotions, but you know, hot flashes, exercises,
sexual arousal, um, you name it. Well, there's also the
kind of blush that can arise when you do have
attention directed towards you. But it's pleasurable, right, Maybe it's
some sort of positive experience in your blushing, but it
(10:00):
then can become negative because you're called out for it.
So there's a changeability to blushing. Um. And there there
are a ton of different kinds as you say that
we haven't really gotten to the bottom of, and a
bunch of different sources for blushing. But I think most
people can relate to a blushing related to unwanted attention
(10:22):
at one time or another in your life. Right. And
in order to get to the depths of the self
conscious blush, there was a study conducted by Peter D.
Drummond and Nadia Mirco. This was published in the March
two thousand and four edition of Psychotherapy, with the paper
uh titled staring at one side of the face increases
(10:46):
blood flow on that side of the face. Okay, so
let's figure out what they did here, because I think
that gives you a clue to at least one of
their methods. The setup is this. They had twenty eight
participants who were asked to either sing out loud or
read out loud. Robert, what would your preference be? It
(11:06):
comes down to who's uh, who's watching? You know, I'm
going to be more comfortable reading. But but singing is
a different a different situation entirely. It's a different experience,
a different communication, a different expression of yourself. Uh. Right,
Reading is more it's a normative thing, right, Like you're
talking right now. You can read at the same pace.
There's not a lot of difference there. But singing out
(11:29):
of context, like when you're not on a stage really
kind of uh draws a lot of attention, right, says, Hey,
look at me doing something totally weird out of context. Um.
So that's why they chose this, and this is what
they found. Increases in cheek temperature were greater on the
observed than the unobserved side during both tasks. Okay, changes
(11:51):
in cheek temperature were symmetrical when the experiment or sat
next to another twenty three participants and looked straight ahead,
as well when the experiment or stared at one side
of participants face through a glass window while the participants
would sing. However, increases in cutaneous blood flow were greater
on the observed and the unobserved side of the forehead
(12:13):
during singing. Okay, there's more blushing going on on one
side of the face. Um, So I think that gives
you a bit of a clue as to that unwanted
attention and how it would act on the body. Okay,
And of course, as we were discussing before we came
into record, I imagine this this may differ depending on
(12:34):
how musical one's family upbringing is, or how how prone
one is to break into song in their daily life. Right,
if you were really off key, perhaps you would have
a scarlet blush, which might even be sort of saying
I apologize. And indeed, that's a whole other argument that
that blushing is a signal to your fellow. Your fellow
(12:54):
primates to to communicate something. Uh. Now, when it comes
to primate it's it's worth noting and I think I've
mentioned this in the past when you when you look
at social and non social primates, the non social ones,
the loners, that's where you tend to find the really
crazy looking uh, primate faces, that's where you see, you know,
a whole lot of colors and and uh and and
(13:17):
and and just crazy stuff going on, you know, like
really the eye catching primates. But the social primates, those
are the ones that are gonna have the planer faces,
the place that the faces that there's less remarkable coloration
going on. And that's because the face, as with humans,
is essentially um a communications array. You know, it's for
the use of expressions and micro expressions to communicate what
(13:41):
you're feeling and what you're about to do to those
around you. And so the argument here is that the
blush is pretty much the same. Now, if it is,
then what is a blush saying? Well? According to clinical
psychologist and author Robert J. Edelman has done a lot
of work with blushing and shame, He says that it's
essentially saying, hey, I'm sorry, I'm at fault. I understand
(14:02):
the gravity of what has happened, I empathize. In short,
it's signaling that the blushers uh. In short, it signals
the blushers adherence to societal norms and acknowledges failure, communicates
appeasement and a nonverbal apology. Um, which which I think
matches up with a lot of a lot of our
experiences of shame, you know. Yeah. And I'm just curious
(14:25):
to know what sort of circumstances cause you to blush. Um. Well,
I was thinking about this earlier when you're talking about
like positive comments making one blush, Like I I do
feel like I experienced that if someone says something nice
about me in the presence of others, I get that
kind of uncomfortable blush, even though I'm receiving positive feedback.
(14:47):
It's kind of an embarrassment thing. I mean, it's not shame, right,
you know, it's not a shame. It must be that
attention thing, you know, it's um and uh yeah. And
in terms of like straight up shameful blushing, I so
I do blush about Let's say, if I forget to
you know, do something, you know, around the house, and
it's like, oh, well, that's you know, like I said,
(15:07):
I forgot to clean the cat box or something, you know,
Like I might blush when I admit that, because it's like, ah,
not only did I not clean out the cat box,
I'm the type of person who forgets to the cat
box that's pooping it, um, you know, which is a
little bit of guilt and shame with that. Yeah, because
I'm I'm a pretty you know, because I guess it
kind of ties into, you know, how I view myself
and how I want other people to view me. So
I view myself as the type of person who wouldn't
(15:30):
let the cat poop build up your cat box cleaner exactly.
So if I if I deviate from that, like that's
like a fault in me. So, yeah, I've thought of
it before, and it for me oddly, it's when someone
makes some sort of sexual innuendo. I'm not necessarily embarrassed
at that. In fact, I'm usually the first person to
do that. It makes some sort of you know, sexual
(15:51):
innuendo joke. But if someone else says it, then for
whatever reason, I yeah, where you're just you're it's almost
like you're you're embarrassed for other people or you're well,
I mean even if it's like you're privy to the joke,
so you were in the culture of the joke, you're
you're among your fellow primates, and this is the subject
(16:12):
matter on the table, you know. Yeah, we actually got
a great email about this. It's called second hand embarrassment. Yeah,
I mean that ties in directly to what we're talking
about here, But embarrassment it's again its own category. It
doesn't have these long ranging effects that shame does. Before
we get into the deterrent side of shame or potential uses,
I do want to point out a couple of quick
(16:33):
stats here. One study found that of those polls that
they never blushed alone, which is interesting and it kind
of backs up the idea that it's about communicating and
being observed. But then you already mentioned like blushing, um
while writing engage in a solitary act. So yeah, we
(16:53):
were talking about this earlier that sometimes from the effort
of writing, especially from writing some piece of fiction, that
I come out USh cheeked and blushing. Yeah. And oh
and I also want to point out that there was
a two thousand nine study that found that people who
blush due to some violation are seeing less negatively eve
they blush, So uh, the idea of being that that
(17:14):
again we're potentially communicating authentic shame over something. And then
when when we receive that signal from another of our
fellow primates, we say, oh, well, they're really sorry, they
really feel bad about it, So I'm going to be
less hard on them because there's the blush. Well, and
that's an aspect of vulnerability to write. All right, So
(17:34):
if you want to learn more about blushing, do check
out Josh Clark's article why do people Blush? It's really excellent. Um. Now,
when we talk about shame versus guilt as a deterrent um,
we've got some interesting findings here, especially if you start
to think about your mom, what her her modus operandi
was growing up to she shamey or did she guilt you?
(17:56):
Because because one is far more effective in the other. Um.
And this sort of power of shaming, by the way,
goes back way way far right, because um, there there
is a power to it. It dates back at least
to the stockades of colonial times here in the United States.
But the question then becomes does public shaming work as
(18:18):
a deterrent to crimes or even unwanted behaviors and George
Mason psychologist June technique. She wanted to answer those questions.
She suspected that shame would be less effective than guilt
in deterring for future crime. So think of the example
of guilt equals I did something bad, right in Shane
equals I am bad. Okay. Now, what she did is
(18:40):
she recruited more than four hundred inmates at a local jail,
all recently incarcerated on felony charges. She administered a standard
assessment to identify which inmates were prone to guilt feeling
feelings or shame feelings, and it also identified those who
most who were most likely to blame others for their problems,
(19:01):
because that's key here too. Then the inmates served their
time and they were released. About a year after the release,
Tagni and her colleagues followed up to see how they
were doing, and they used several different measurements, including self
reports and public reports, to come up with a recidivism
score for each inmate. And by recidivism, what we mean
here is a relapse into criminal behavior that might land
(19:24):
them in jail again. Yeah, So her prediction was that
shame from intimates would be more likely to return to
crime after they were released, and her initial findings seemed
to support this. Shame seemed to cause former inmates to
blame others for their misfortune, leading to to to repeat crimes,
but those who felt guilty were less likely to repeat
(19:44):
their crimes a year out. So again placed directly into
do you do you feel like you're actually guilty or
is it something deeper? Right? But but then further study
revealed that this is a little more complicated than that.
UH found that shame led to is m only when
the humiliated inmates blamed others, but when shamed individuals accepted
(20:06):
the blame themselves, they didn't suffer an increase in recidivism.
So in some cases we can see shame might hold
you back. Other times it could give you a certain
amount of strength to give you a springboard to make
some changes. UM. One of the key ways here UH
that the technique points out is that shame can make
(20:27):
you withdrawal from others, and it kind of depends on
who you're withdrawing from whether that's a good move or bad.
So if you means you're when withdrawing from enablers, from
other criminals, from addicts, well then that might be a
step in the right direction. That kind of with withdrawing,
withdrawing from people would give be like a springboard for change.
On the other hand, if you're withdrawing from positive influences,
(20:49):
if you're withdrawing from family in people that you feel
ashamed in the presence of, or you're withdrawing from other
important UH structures in your life. Say say church is important,
you end up withdrawing from church because you're ashamed of
what you did. If you're withdrawing from you know, other
other resources that could help you out, then that's that's
bad news. You just go into that that shame spiral
(21:10):
away from the UH, the the latter that could pull
you up. That's right, And particularly if you're withdrawing because
you blame that person or that institution or that thing.
And we see parallels with the study and alcoholism. Dr
Tony Webb, who holds a PhD in trans disciplinary research
(21:32):
at the University of West Sydney, has has looked into
this and he says that internally generated shame turns into
shaming something done to us that violates our sense of
the fair go and not unnaturally we tend to react
against this by attacking others, um blaming as as we discussed,
hiding as we also discussed and hiding from ourselves, he says.
(21:55):
And so this plays into a kind of social and
ecological apathy, as he says, and a wide range of
addictive behaviors have a common root, and what he says
is unacknowledged shame. So let's look at a study here
that looks a bit more into It's from two thousand
and thirteen from the Clinical Psychological Science by Jessica Tracy
(22:20):
and Daniel Randall's of the University of British Columbia, and
they looked at drinking and health outcomes and a sample
of newly sober recovering alcoholics. They used measures that assessed
both self reported shame and shame related behaviors. And these
this becomes really important by the way the self reported
versus the behavior. So the behavior might be a narrow
(22:42):
chest and slumping shoulders, and the researchers took that information
and they hypothesized that participants would be less able to
voluntarily control their behavioral displays of shame and that would
be their tell. So in the first session, participants were
asked to describe the last time that they drank and
they felt badly about it, and the responses were videotaped
(23:04):
by the researchers. In a second session about four months later,
participants were asked to report their drinking behaviors and they
completed questionnaires about their physical and mental health at both
of these sessions. Now Here are the findings people who
displayed more shame related behavior were likely to be in
were more likely to be in poor physical health at
(23:25):
the time of their first session. But more surprising, though,
was the finding that behavioral displays of shame predicted whether
participants would relapse after the first session, not the self
reported but the way they were behaving with their their
body postures and Tracy and Randall says how much shame
participants displayed strongly predicted not only whether they relapsed, but
(23:48):
how bad that relapse was. That is, how many drinks
they had if they did relapse. So they could take
that information, they could take this, this outward expression of
shame through the body and predict whether or not that
person would would fall into say that recidivism, so to speak,
of alcoholism, that relapse. It's interesting this uh reminds me
(24:12):
a little bit of the implicit association tests that we
discussed in our last episode, you know about weeding out
are self reported UM ideas about self and others versus
what we're feeling and and what and what we're thinking
below cognition, right. I mean this requires you to identify
your feelings is either shame or guilt in order to
(24:36):
begin to understand how to change the behavior, right, because
if you're unaware of it, you have an implicit bias,
right that's working under the cover about how how this
shame is manifesting in yourself. Um. And so that's that
would be one of the things that that you would
have to confront if you wanted to change yourself, because
(24:57):
if you think I am this, I am a bad
person as opposed to I have exhibited some bad behaviors. Well,
that's the difference between change and just staying mired in
that mindset. Indeed, and this this all stacks up really
well with UH what I was reading from University of
Alberta researcher Jessica van Villet UH two thousand nine study
(25:20):
where she looked at positive shame and problematic shame, which
you know we've been discussing here on the positive level,
of shame can be that springboard. It can it can
force us to make changes that that that help us
to protect our relationships and preserve that fabric of society.
Again getting into that idea that that we feel shame
and because we've fallen out of step with societal norms. Uh.
(25:42):
But then there's the problematic shame where you know, the
shame spy or withdrawing from others, withdrawing from the very
things you need to pull yourself out of the pit. Right.
And her research shows that people who feel debilitated by
shame tend to again internalize and over personalized that since
the situation and uh, and they seem to feel like
they cannot change things, they cannot pull things around. Uh.
(26:06):
So she has a few suggestions here that I think
are are very valid and really stack up well we've
been discussing here. She says, step back from the problem
and view the picture in a different light. She says,
possibly identify external factors that contribute to your actions or situation,
break the hopelessness, and realize that there are steps you
can take to make things right again and make connections
(26:28):
to people, uh, individuals, to humanity itself or even even
in some cases depending on your particular worldview to a
higher power or a more noble idea, you know. And
I think this is particularly important in this the sort
of environment that we are in historically with the Internet culture,
there is a lot of shaming, right, and so we're
(26:52):
absorbing the on subconscious levels. And so I think that
you even have to uh cultivate an awareness and that
aspect too. It's not just your own behaviors or how
you operate in the world, but the kind of stuff
that you are exposing yourself to you or even participating
in virtually online. And I'm talking about dog shaming here. Oh,
(27:13):
you're talking about the someone's dog has done something bad
like knock over a plant, and then they essentially show
them ashamed with a sign that says I knocked over
my master's potted plant. Yes, there are a lot of
dog shaming sites, including dog shaming dot com. And just
as you said, it could be like a dog looking
sort of, you know, like it's been reproached and it's
(27:34):
got those baleful eyes, and it might say I tried
to make a sandwich, but I don't know how, and
then it's got a bunch of pieces of bread stacked
up on its head because they because they've as we've
discussed in u in some of our past episodes about
dog and human relationships, they take on that submissive pose
which we often project shame and apology and always feels
(27:55):
sad over what he did, when in reality, it's it's submission.
It is And um, if if you want to know
more about that, that episode is really interesting. UM. I
think it's called Your Dog Doesn't Love You, but it
talks about the coevolution of humans and dogs and how
dogs eye tracking evolved with humans because it was so
important for them to try to clue into what we
(28:16):
wanted from them and what we were thinking so that
they could get the scraps of food from us. Yeah,
of course it's interesting to think back on that and
then look at this episode where we dismantle a human
display of emotion and uh and when you when you
start really taking it apart, like is it that different
from the from this display of obedience and submission on
(28:37):
the part of the dog that we classify as as
being who I'm sorry, And then we're talking about blood
vessels welling up in the face and it's basically saying, oh,
I stepped out of line. It's it's in a way,
it's kind of its own uh signal of submission. The
difference here, though, is the dog is not saying I
am a bad dog. I mean the dogs like, all right,
what do I need to do to get to that treat?
(28:59):
What sort of Oh you want the bailful eyes? Okay,
here you go, there you go. Yeah, the human human
complexity changes everything. All right? Well, hey, you want to
check out dog shaming, You want to check out that
episode on whether your dog Loves You? You can find
all of that on the landing page for this episode.
(29:20):
And that is it's Stuffable your mind dot com. That's
the mother ship. That's where we find all of our videos,
podcast episodes, blog post, you name it. And if you
have feedback on this on guilt shame, embarrassment um, you
can send us an email at blow the Mind at
house to forks dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot
(29:43):
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Introducing… Aubrey O’Day Diddy’s former protege, television personality, platinum selling music artist, Danity Kane alum Aubrey O’Day joins veteran journalists Amy Robach and TJ Holmes to provide a unique perspective on the trial that has captivated the attention of the nation. Join them throughout the trial as they discuss, debate, and dissect every detail, every aspect of the proceedings. Aubrey will offer her opinions and expertise, as only she is qualified to do given her first-hand knowledge. From her days on Making the Band, as she emerged as the breakout star, the truth of the situation would be the opposite of the glitz and glamour. Listen throughout every minute of the trial, for this exclusive coverage. Amy Robach and TJ Holmes present Aubrey O’Day, Covering the Diddy Trial, an iHeartRadio podcast.
Betrayal: Season 4
Karoline Borega married a man of honor – a respected Colorado Springs Police officer. She knew there would be sacrifices to accommodate her husband’s career. But she had no idea that he was using his badge to fool everyone. This season, we expose a man who swore two sacred oaths—one to his badge, one to his bride—and broke them both. We follow Karoline as she questions everything she thought she knew about her partner of over 20 years. And make sure to check out Seasons 1-3 of Betrayal, along with Betrayal Weekly Season 1.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.