Shame has experienced something of a rebirth. For decades, guilt was seen as the more adaptive emotion, with shame being derided as an archaic relic of traditional societies. In the age of individualism, the more individually-focused guilt was more fashionable than the socially-rooted shame. The differences between guilt and shame are not fully agreed upon on, but some of the common differentiations include (1) guilt arises from within, whereas shame comes from others, (2) guilt focuses on an act, while shame labels the whole person. These differences are worth consideration in their own right, and are not the focus of this post.

Both shame and guilt have been conceptualized as “moral emotions”, a class of higher emotions that are concerned with moral feelings, or affective judgements. Within the “moral emotions”, they have been further classed (by

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