Are shame and guilt personality styles associated with different alcohol use-related outcome expectancies?

ABSTRACT

Background

Whilst drinking to reduce negative affect (e.g., anxiety and depression) is a commonly reported motivation for consuming alcohol, minimal research has explored associations between shame-proneness and self-reported outcome expectancies from alcohol use. The present study aimed to explore the relationship between guilt, shame and alcohol use-related expectancies in a predominately undergraduate, community sample.

Methods

Self-report data was collected for measures of these constructs in addition to overall alcohol use from a sample of 281 individuals, mean age 22.22 years (SD = 7.83).

Results

Overall alcohol consumption was associated with both positive and negative alcohol use outcome expectancies. Contrary to hypotheses, shame-prone individuals did not appear to have a particularly strong belief that alcohol is actually effective in reducing tension. However, shame-prone individuals may believe that alcohol helps serve to reduce physiological arousal and other anxiety-related phenomena experienced in social contexts, and possibly also in the lead up to and during intimate encounters. In contrast, guilt-prone individuals expect and believe that they are successfully able to avoid negative emotional experiences after having consumed alcohol.

Conclusions

Findings are broadly congruent with research indicating that shame-proneness is associated with general emotion regulation difficulties, while guilt-proneness tends to be unrelated to such problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Shame
• guilt
• alcohol
• expectancies
• belief

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank all participants for their involvement in this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability

Due to ethical restrictions, the authors are unable to distribute the source data for this manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.