The Role of Culture and Social Threats in Constructing Shame: Moving Beyond a Western Lens

Public Significance Statement Shame is a self-conscious emotion that is both innate and strongly influenced by cultural and social factors. Our current definitions of shame should be expanded to become more contextualized, culturally sensitive, and ecologically meaningful. Understanding shame in its context also means taking into consideration the role of stigma and discrimination in experiences of shame. The emotion of shame is typically conceptualized through a Western and universalist lens. In this article, we first critically examine competing definitions of shame rooted in the Western traditions and contrast them to conceptualizations of shame rooted in other cultural traditions (e.g., as exemplified by the work of Chinese and Taiwanese researchers). We then explore the critical role of both culture and chronic social threats, such as discrimination, in the social construction of shame. Although current research points to continuities and discontinuities in the experience of shame across contexts, Western definitions have restricted our capacity to understand conceptualizations and regulation strategies from diverse cultural traditions, shame's role in self-improvement, and the propensity of shame to act as a signal in reaction to social stigma. Our aim is to highlight the existing evidence for the social construction of shame, to encourage research on shame no longer centring Western frameworks, and to identify additional research avenues for the study of contextualized, ecologically meaningful conceptualizations of shame.