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5 Shame, Status, and Social Roles: Psychobiology and Evolution
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Published:August 1998
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Abstract
Shame is well understood to be an aversive experience, related to feeling demeaned, reduced, disgraced, or diminished, which people are highly motivated to avoid. One of the intriguing questions about shame is whether its underpinning psychobiological mechanisms are of recent origin, related to human self consciousness and self-awareness, or whether shame is an elaboration of phylogenetically older mechanisms. In this chapter we suggest the latter, stressing in particular the following points. The psychobiological mediators of human shame evolved from phylogenetically older mechanisms that originally evolved to regulate social rank and status behavior, in particular submissive behavior. (2) The elicitors of both submissive behavior and human shame are associated with hostile and/or rejecting social signals. (3) Such social signals, indicating disruption to social relationships, not only affect emotions but are psychobiological dysregulating; thus shame is an experience of psychobiological dysregulation. (4) Human social status and acceptance in groups and relationships have evolved to be highly reliant on signals of being attractive, valued, wanted and approved of by others, such that losses of these signals can be dysregulating. (5) The self-consciousness dimension of human shame may be observable in nonhuman primates.
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