Emotions: Meeting Social Needs

Guilt & shame are social emotions that help us navigate the interpersonal settings we all depend on for survival.

Social emotions help us regulate our behavior so that we can attain the sex, love, and belonging that are fundamental to our survival and wellbeing.

Throughout our lives, we build a model of what behaviors are OK and not OK in our social settings. In other words, what gets us in trouble with the group, and what actions are so bad that we could face rejection or ejection from the group.

From an evolutionary perspective, individual humans – especially as children but throughout our lives – are impotent if alone in the wilderness. Rejection from the group is a life or death issue for us. Even today, in societies with modest safety nets where social rejection may not lead to death by lion attack or starvation, we still see that loneliness is one of the strongest predictors of death.

As children, we use family, school and social reinforcement, as well as play to learn where the boundaries of acceptable behavior lie. Developmental psychologists believe that we first build this model of social norms as an “external” framework – we can’t start screaming in the middle of a restaurant because we’ll get in trouble and mom will punish us (the punishment is external). This fear of external punishment or social rejection for our actions is what we call shame.

As we mature, this framework becomes “internal” for many of us. We can’t start screaming in the middle of a restaurant because it’s wrong and disruptive to do so, and we will feel bad about ourselves afterwards. This internalized sense of the badness of our actions is what we call guilt.

Both shame and guilt are important self-regulatory mechanisms. They feel bad to make us behave better. Shame usually works to make us do better next time, while guilt often works to prevent us doing something bad in the first place or, if we do slip up, to help us apologies and seek forgiveness from those we’ve harmed.