Understanding internal and external shame in childhood: the role of theory of mind

ABSTRACT

Shame can be either internal or external. The former type of shame is associated with what one thinks and feels about one’s self, the latter is linked with what one believes that others think about the self. This study aimed to (a) compare children’s ability to understand these two types of shame and (b) test the hypothesis that only external shame attribution is linked to children’s ability to understand second-order beliefs. Four- to 6-year-old children (N = 93) were presented with a task assessing their ability to attribute internal and external shame to story protagonists. Children were also tested on a battery of first-order and second-order theory of mind tasks. The results provide evidence for a parallel age-related increase in children’s understanding of the two types of shame. In line with our hypothesis, only external, but not internal, shame attribution was associated with children’s ability to understand others’ second-order beliefs.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• external shame
• internal shame
• understanding
• second-order belief
• theory of mind

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ A score of 1 was also given to two children who instead of the term ‘ashamed’ used the term ‘bad’ and to three children who instead of ‘ashamed’ used the term ‘awful’ to describe the emotional state of the protagonist (‘he feels awful’; ‘she feels bad’). In all five cases children justified their responses in a way that indicated that they were considering the impact of the situation described in the vignette either on the protagonist’s view of him/herself (e.g., ‘He feels awful.’; ‘He has many many pimples and he does not like to see his face in the mirror.’) or on others’ beliefs and evaluations of the protagonist’s self (e.g., ‘She feels bad because if the other children see the mark on her leg they will laugh at her.’). Similar criteria have been used in previous work (Banerjee, 2002) investigating children’s understanding of another closely related to shame self-conscious emotion, embarrassment.