Lack of guilt, guilt, and shame: a multi-informant study on the relations between self-conscious emotions and psychopathology in clinically referred children and adolescents

Abstract

The present study examined the relationships between dysregulations in self-conscious emotions and psychopathology in clinically referred children and adolescents. For this purpose, parent-, teacher-, and self-report Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment data of 1000 youth aged 4–18 years was analyzed as this instrument not only provides information on the intensity levels of lack of guilt, guilt, and shame, but also on the severity of various types of psychopathology. The results first of all indicated that dysregulations of self-conscious emotions were more common in this clinical sample than in the general population. Further, a consistent pattern was found with regard to the relationships between self-conscious emotions and childhood psychopathology. That is, lack of guilt was predominantly associated with oppositional defiant and conduct (i.e., externalizing) problems, while guilt and shame were primarily linked with affective and anxiety (i.e., internalizing) problems. By and large, these findings confirm what has been found in non-clinical youth, and suggest that self-conscious emotions play a small but significant role in the psychopathology of children and adolescents.

Shame on Me! Self-Conscious Emotions and Big Five Personality Traits and Their Relations to Anxiety Disorders Symptoms in Young, Non-Clinical Adolescents

“…All these findings underline the relevance of self-conscious emotions, especially shame, in anxiety pathology in youths. In line with previous work in adults, guilt was found to be largely unrelated to anxiety, and in case such a link did emerge [ 32 ], this was probably due to shared variance with shame [ 2 , 8 ].…”

“…A further aim was to examine the psychometric properties of the two assessment instruments that were used to measure shame and guilt in children and adolescents, namely the brief shame and guilt questionnaire for children (BSGQ-C) [ 42 ] and a number of items taken from the youth self-report (YSR) [ 43 ]. Until now, the evidence on the validity of these scales for measuring self-conscious emotions is quite limited [ 32 , 42 ], and so the present study provided the opportunity to demonstrate that (e) the BSGQ-C and the YSR items have sufficient convergent validity and correlate in a similar, theoretically meaningful way with the personality traits of neuroticism and extraversion and anxiety disorders symptoms.…”

“…Three items taken from the youth self-report (YSR) version of the Achenbach System of Empirically-Based Assessment (ASEBA) [ 43 , 44 ] were used as an alternative index of youth’s self-conscious emotions. These were item 26 “Lacks guilt”, item 52 “Feels very guilty”, and item 71 “Self-conscious, easily ashamed” representing respectively the concepts of lack of guilt, guilt, and shame [ 32 ].…”

“…The results showed that shame was the only significant mediator, signifying an indirect path between neuroticism and anxiety. A final study by Muris et al [ 32 ] assessed levels of self-conscious emotions as assessed via three informants (i.e., children themselves, parents and teachers) in 1000 clinically referred youths with anxiety disorders and other types of internalizing (depression), externalizing (disruptive behavior disorders) and developmental (autism) psychopathology (of whom 383 were aged between 12 and 18 years). The results revealed that both shame and guilt were elevated in children and adolescents with internalizing problems, but that this was most consistently (i.e., across all informants) true for the young patients with anxiety disorders as their primary diagnosis.…”

Liberating parents from guilt: a grounded theory study of parents’ internet communities for the recognition of ADHD

“…According to the author, parenting associated with ADHD presented by parents' communities should be understood and investigated as a form of social construction. Digital communities cannot guarantee that they effectively protect parents from feeling guilty (Muris et al, 2015;Muris & Meesters, 2012) merely by liberating parents from guilt feelings through an on-line discourse. Our study suggests that the numerous requirements for being an ultimate parent for a child with ADHD, instead, are likely to heighten feelings of guilt in those who don't succeed to follow the guidelines.…”