abstract: The purpose of this action research study was to help medical students normalize feelings of shame related to academics and to respond to these feelings in more adaptive ways. Several cycles of research informed this study, which investigated the influence of an educational innovation. The innovation focused on helping medical students understand feelings of shame, foster self-efficacy in shame resiliency practices, and encourage help-seeking behaviors. In short, the study sought to understand how these medical students responded to feelings of shame related to academic performance before and after participation in the educational innovation. A total of 14 second-year medical students participated in this concurrent mixed-method study. The educational innovation was designed by this action researcher and informed by Brené Brown’s shame resilience theory. Three sources of data were used to answer the research questions, including a pre- and post-innovation survey, interviews, and student journals. Major findings suggested that the educational innovation was effective in enhancing the study participants’ knowledge of shame, increasing perceptions of self-efficacy in the practices related to resiliency to feeling of academic shame, as well as, promoting help-seeking behaviors. The data also revealed a range of academic shame triggers identified by these medical students. This action research study validated the need to normalize feelings of shame and support medical students developing practices for resiliency to this powerful feeling. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2020

L’étude de l’histoire de la faillite de ses origines romaines à sa disparition en 1985 témoigne de l'instrumentalisation de l'humiliation par le droit. Le commerçant incapable d’honorer ses engagements même sans avoir commis de fraude représente un danger pour l’ordre social et une nuisance pour ses créanciers. Un danger qu’il faut neutraliser par tous les moyens. L’humiliation parait alors la meilleure voie pour assurer la visibilité et l’exclusion du commerçant défaillant. Cette stigmatisation protéiforme s’adapte à l’évolution de la société pour imprimer à la faillite la honte qui s’y attache. D’abord imposée et organisée par le droit elle s’émancipe peu à peu du circuit légal. Lorsque le droit consacre explicitement l’innocence du failli la société continue de faire de lui un paria. Un coup de maître juridique puisque l'institutionnalisation d'une répression de la défaillance aux origines de notre civilisation n'est plus dépendante du droit mais de la société. / Studying the history of bankrupcy, from its origins in ancient Rome to its disappearance in 1985, reveals how the law instrumentalized humiliation. A trader who proves unable to honor his commitments, even if he did not engage in fraud, is a threat to the social order and a liability to his creditors. This danger must be neutralized by any means. Humiliation thus appears as the best way to flag and exclude the failing trader. This protean stigmatisation adapts to the evolution of society to establish the link between bankrupcy and shame. It was, at first, imposed and organised by justice, but it progressively emancipates from the legal apparatus. Even after the law explicitly acknowledged the innocence of bankrupt individuals, society kept casting them out. This judicial master stroke majes the institutionalisation of the repression of bankrupcy that exists since the origins of our civilization no longer relies on justice, but on society. Bankrupcy has disappeared from the Codes, but the concept still exists in citizens' minds, and the stigma it occasionates remains just as powerful. Reforms cannot single-handedly erase the secular stigmatisation of bankrupcy, which deeply impregnates mentalities. At this point, it seems as though we have to acknowledge failure: would it be that it is impossible to erase the stigmatisation of an innocent CEO but incapable of paying back his creditors. Asopting a historical perspective shows that the constant and progressive move towards more leniency from a judicial point of view is a worn-out solution. In order to obtain new results, the methods need to be reexamined.

Research literature on homelessness makes frequent reference to shame, but with little inquiry into the role shame may play in the lives of homeless men. This study used Consensual Qualitative Research methodology (Hill, Thompson, & Williams, 1997) to interview 24 men in a small Midwestern city to explore how homeless men experience shame. The results from this study indicate that shame is experienced as a "painful sense of worthlessness and failure" whereby men attribute their homelessness to their own perceived characterological flaws. To avoid the painful experience of shame and stigma, homeless men appear to develop and use defense strategies. While the defense strategies may help alleviate the effects of shame and stigma in the immediate, the strategies appear to negatively affect opportunities that facilitate an exodus from homelessness. This study also found that despite living in a transitional shelter, rare mention was made of plans to exit homelessness. Presented too are the limitations and implications of this research.

Thesis advisor: Marjorie E. Howes / This work applies current theories of affect to inform an understanding of the role of shame in the process of narration. It begins with a dual-sided hypothesis: experiences of humiliation and its consequence, shame, can initiate and mediate a narrative act, and the narrative process can immediately or over time mitigate and even eliminate the negative feelings of shame. The project particularly draws upon the pioneering affect theories of Silvan S. Tomkins to focus upon the life and written works of Willa Cather. It discovers and traces a poetics of shame as it occurs throughout the narratives she produced over a lifetime. It highlights how the Cathers’ forced migration from Virginia to Nebraska resulted in a loss of class and status as well as alterations in family dynamics. These disruptions created the foundations for her perceived humiliations and the shame that motivated her use of recurrent scenes, characters, narrative resolutions and even the very language she chose. This study emphasizes the usefulness of the application of affect studies for literary criticism and cultural studies. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2020. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

Research on shame and guilt has mainly been conducted in individualistic Western cultures. Some qualitative research, however, examined shame and guilt experiences in Chinese culture. Bedford (2004) identified 7 terms that represent emotional experiences of “shame” and “guilt.” We report 3 studies examining Mandarin Chinese speakers’ recalled experiences of negative self-conscious emotions and their related appraisals and motivations. Results reveal that instead of categorizing negative self-conscious emotion terms into 2 superordinate categories of “shame” and “guilt,” 3 clusters are more suitable based on their correlations and associated characteristics. Implications for cross-cultural studies on self-conscious emotions are discussed.

The purpose of this study was to determine if parent adolescent attachment is correlated with adolescent hope and shame two years later with parent psychological control in the year in between as a mediator. Data at wave four, five, and six for 308 families from the Flourishing Families Project were used. In previous studies attachment has been shown to be important in adolescent development. This study found that the adolescent's perception of the relationship is negatively correlated with shame and positively correlated with hope in the adolescent. Additionally the adolescent's perception of their relationship with both mother and father was correlated with mother and father psychological control, and mother and father psychological control was correlated with adolescent shame and hope. Psychological control was a significant mediator between the adolescent perception of the relationship with both parents and adolescent shame and hope.

Suicide is a significant public health concern and ranks as the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S. Veterans are at a disproportionately higher risk for suicide, due to risk factors such as exposure to trauma and its negative cognitive-emotional sequalae, such as PTSD, shame, and guilt. However, not all veterans exposed to traumatic events, or who experience shame and guilt, die by suicide, perhaps as a result of the presence of individual-level protective factors such as self-compassion. Conceptualized as self-kindness, mindfulness and common humanity, self-compassion is beneficially associated with mental and physical health, including reduced suicide risk. We examined the potential serial mediating effects of shame/guilt, separated into two models, and PTSD in the relation between self-compassion and suicide risk in a sample of U.S. veterans (N = 317). Participants in our IRB-approved study provided informed consent and completed the Self-Compassion Scale - Short Form, Differential Emotions Scale-IV, PTSD Checklist-Military Version (PCL-M) for DSM-IV, and Suicidal Behaviors Questionnaire - Revised (SBQ-R). Supporting hypotheses, shame/guilt and PTSD, and PTSD alone, mediated the relation between self-compassion and suicide risk, but shame/guilt alone did not. Our results remained significant when covarying depressive symptoms. Therapeutic interventions such as Mindful Self-Compassion and Compassion-Focused Therapy may increase self-compassion and ameliorate negative cognitive-emotional sequelae, including suicide risk, in veterans.

The study rereads the narrative of Mark 6:14-29 from Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theory of mimicry and ambivalence. Unlike other interpretations that focus on the death of John the Baptist by Herod, the focal point of this study is the daughter who danced during Herod’s banquet. By taking account of the female body that is culturally represented as the inferior gender, and the use of status to determine power, the text is interpreted through the lenses of gender theory and the social-scientific model of honour and shame. By observing the unequal power structures and the suppression of female bodies, the study indicates that the daughter, through her dance, gained agency, reconstructed her identity, and displaced power on a dance floor. Instead of being a sexual male gaze, she became a negotiator to Herod. / Dissertation (MTh)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / New Testament Studies / MTh / Unrestricted

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has been primarily conceptualized as a fear-based disorder, but accumulating research indicates that shame can also strongly contribute to the development and maintenance of PTSD. Existing evidence-based treatments for PTSD typically focus on dysregulated fear responding and do not directly target the affective experience of shame. Interventions that promote self-compassion have shown promise for reducing shame related to various clinical problems, but this approach has not been systematically evaluated in traumatized individuals. The aim of this study was to develop and evaluate a brief compassion-based therapy, with the hypothesis that it would reduce trauma-related shame and PTSD symptoms. The intervention consisted of six weekly individual therapy sessions focused on promoting self-compassion in response to a traumatic event and its sequelae. Using a multiple baseline design, the intervention was evaluated in a community sample of trauma-exposed adults (N = 10) with elevated shame and PTSD symptoms. Participants completed assessments on a weekly basis during a 2-, 4-, or 6-week baseline phase and 6-week treatment phase, and at 2- and 4-weeks after the intervention. By the end of treatment, 90% of participants demonstrated reliable decreases in PTSD symptom severity (p < .05), while 80% of participants showed reliable reductions in shame (p < .05), relative to their respective scores at baseline. These improvements were maintained at 2- and 4-week follow-up, with large effect sizes for PTSD symptom severity (d = 2.26) and shame (d = 2.12), compared to scores at baseline. The intervention was also associated with improvements in self-blame (d = 2.61), self-compassion (d = 2.28), mindfulness (d = 2.21), positive affect (d = 1.07), and negative affect (d = 2.14). Greater increases in self-compassion from baseline to follow-up were correlated with greater reductions in PTSD symptom severity (r = -.76, p < .05) and in shame (r = -.79, p < .01). Participants reported high levels of satisfaction with the intervention. The results from the present study support the hypothesis that compassion-based therapy is associated with reductions in trauma-related shame and PTSD symptoms. The marked improvements observed during the relatively brief intervention suggest that the intervention may be useful as either a stand-alone treatment or as a supplement to other treatments.

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