Shame and Guilt: A Psycho cultural View of the Japanese Self¹

Communication attitudes of Japanese school-age children who stutter

“…Therefore, the ''private self,'' which is the part of self that remains unexpressed and hidden, occupies a greater area of the total self for the Japanese, whereas the ''public self,'' which is the part of self that communicates externally, is greater for Americans. According to Lebra (1983), aversion to exposure and the desire for formally flawless public display that underlies Japanese sensitivity for shame, act to inhibit self-expression. Therefore, clinicians who treat Japanese CWS might need to focus specifically on helping the children talk openly about their stuttering.…”

Shame in Two Cultures: Implications for Evolutionary Approaches

“…13 (Parish, 1991), 14 (Creighton, 1990;Crystal, Parrott, Okazaki & Watanabe, 2001;Lebra, 1983;Miyake & Yamazaki, 1995), 15 Korean (Yang & Rosenblatt, 2001), 16 (Wolf, 1972), 17 (Spiro, 1996), 18 (Mulder, 1996;Sharp & Hanks, 1978), 19 (Lambrecht, 1932), 20 (Rosaldo, 1983), 21 (Dentan, 1979), 22 (Bolyanatz, 1994;Epstein, 1992;Fajans, 1983) (Strathern, 1977), 23 (Myers, 1979) (Tonkinson, 1978, 24 (Sachdev, 1990), 25 (Levy, 1973), 26 (Gregor, 1977), 27 (Kennedy, 1978), 28 (Merrill, 1988), 29 (Nash, 1970), 30 (Simmons, 1960) guilt is often less dependent on considerations of public exposure than shame, the difference in the frequency of guilt-like events merely reflects differences in the methods used in California and Bengkulu -perhaps Californian participants included many cases of guilt-like events because they could easily report on private experience, whereas the Bengkulu data, derived from spontaneous discussions, may have been biased against experiences that did not involve a public component. Although I cannot rule out this possibility, it is striking that guilt-like events never occur in the Bengkulu corpus, and this despite the fact that I was considered a close friend, confidant, and/or member of the immediate family by at least 13 key informants.…”

“…Although such research persisted for some time (e.g., Creighton, 1990;Fajans, 1983;Lebra, 1983), with the fading of the culture-and-personality paradigm in anthropology, the topic gradually fell out of favor. Over the last two decades psychologists have refocused the spotlight on shame, making important strides in understanding this emotion.…”

Discrepancies Between Japanese Undergraduate Students’ Ideal Affect and Actual Affect in Social Contexts and Life Domains

“…More importantly for this ESM study, Japanese psychologists, Fujihara and Kurokawa (1981), reported that there are distinct emotional experiences related to interpersonal relations in Japanese culture, including ninjyou (sympathy), on (indebted), sekentei (appearances), haji (ashamed), and amae (dependence). Similarly, Lebra (1983) examined the psychocultural dimension of shame and guilt in Japanese culture and stated that in terms of these emotions, Bthe Japanese tend to be more aware of others than, for instance, those who have been socialized in the Judeo-Christian theistic tradition^ (p. 193). A series of empirical research studies conducted by Kitayama and colleagues (Kitayama et al 2000(Kitayama et al , 2006 supported this by concluding that Japanese culture fosters socially engaging emotions deriving from and affirming the interdependence of self (e.g., friendly feelings, guilt).…”