Browsing by Subject "Shame"

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    How Malleable Are Beliefs about Traits? Self-Theories About Traits as Motivated Reasoning After Reliving a Negative Self-Conscious Emotion
    (2019-07) Rogers de Alcerro, Jonathan Michael
    Recent studies have shown that beliefs about the malleability of one's personality traits can manifest as motivated reasoning within certain situations, but no studies have examined whether this motivated reasoning is a consequence of emotional states. Based on Gausel and Leach's (2011) model on negative self-conscious emotions, we investigated this possibility by asking participants to relive a moral failure from the past year where they felt either guilt, shame, rejected, or inferior. We hypothesized that reliving a feeling shame or guilt would motivate participants to describe the Big Five trait they attributed most as a cause of their past moral failure as more malleable than their least attributed trait. We also hypothesized that feeling rejected or inferior would motivate participants to act defensively by describing their most attributed trait as less malleable than their least attributed trait. Participants who relived feeling guilt tended to describe their most attributed trait as more malleable than their least attributed trait, but this was not true for participants who relived a feeling shame, rejection, or inferiority. These results suggest that feeling guilt can elicit motivated reasoning about the malleability of one's traits with implications beyond reparative behaviors following a moral failure.
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    Shame, Respect and Well-Being: What Can We Learn from Early Chinese Philosophy?
    (2023-05) Li, Qiannan
    My dissertation aims to bring insights from early Chinese Philosophy into constructive dialogue with Western thought to enrich our philosophical understanding of two significant philosophical questions. First, what is the moral value of the feelings of respect and shame? Second, what are the necessary constituents of a well-lived life? I compare the predominant accounts of respect, shame, and well-being in the Western tradition with the Confucian and Daoist traditions on these topics. I show that a mutual understanding of both perspectives yields a more comprehensive picture of moral emotions and well-being. First, I propose an account of well-being inspired by an early Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi and compare it with the predominant accounts of well-being in Western philosophy. The comparison aims to demonstrate the prudential value of a good process of cultivating well-being, which tends to be ignored in Western theories that focus on achievements. On the moral value of shame, I provide a Confucian analysis of shame and compare it with the Aristotelian account. This comparison aims to challenge the view that shame feelings reflect a person’s damaged self-esteem. Instead, by borrowing insights from the early Confucians, we can see that the disposition to feel shame has moral value in itself and is constitutive of our need to value ourselves in order to feel worthwhile. On the moral value of respect, I compare the Confucian account of respect with the Kantian account. For early Confucians, the notion of respect not only refers to intentional feelings (feelings directed at specific objects) but more frequently refers to a respectful frame of mind. I argue that a Confucian notion of respectfulness helps to extend Kantian respect beyond Kant’s own target of rational agency to respect the elderly and people with mental illness whose rational capacities have been impaired.