Sunday 6th September
So far in this series, I’ve written quite a lot about what shame makes us think and do.
This week, I want to move away from that for a moment, because one of the stranger things about shame is that an emotion so concerned with being seen can also change the way we physically present ourselves to other people.
Humans do some fairly recognisable things when ashamed.
We lower our heads. Our gaze moves away. Our posture can collapse or become smaller. We may speak less, move less, or become less inclined to occupy space.
Researchers have described this as a characteristic “shame display”.
Which raises an interesting question. Why would shame have a display at all?
If the problem is that somebody has discovered something about us that might lower their opinion of us, surely the sensible thing would be to look completely unbothered.
Chest out. Eye contact. Carry on.
(Instead, humans often do almost the opposite).
There is a long tradition of thinking about some of these behaviours as forms of appeasement. Dacher Keltner and colleagues have written about appeasement in human social behaviour, while Daniel Fessler has examined shame from an evolutionary perspective.
The basic idea is that humans are extraordinarily dependent on other humans. Being accepted, valued and considered worth cooperating with has mattered enormously throughout our evolutionary history. So has having some way of responding when our social value appears to have dropped.
A lowered head, averted gaze and subdued posture communicate something quite different from meeting criticism with dominance or defiance.
Something has registered, I’m not escalating this, and I remain responsive to what has happened here.
In this sense, the physical presentation of shame may help reduce hostility and facilitate reconciliation after a social breach.
There is some lovely research on embarrassment that makes a related point. Blushing, nervous smiling, gaze shifts and other familiar signs of embarrassment have been studied as possible appeasement signals. After a social mistake, looking embarrassed can communicate that we recognise something has gone wrong and remain invested in the relationship or social norm.
Which is quite remarkable actually. The thing we desperately wish our face would stop doing may be useful partly because other people can see it.
I should distinguish embarrassment from shame here. Blushing is particularly well studied in relation to embarrassment, and I don’t want to collapse the two simply because they overlap. Shame research has more consistently described things like gaze aversion, downward head movement, slumped posture and behavioural inhibition. But researchers have proposed another possibility for some of those behaviours that I find particularly interesting.
Mitchell Landers and Daniel Sznycer have suggested that parts of the shame display might also function a little like camouflage. In other words, perhaps the familiar desire to disappear when we feel ashamed isn’t entirely metaphorical.
Shame may involve the body changing its relationship to an audience: lowering social challenge, reducing visibility and limiting further opportunities for devaluation.
Of course, none of this means every lowered head is shame, or that there is one universal bodily sequence that everybody performs in exactly the same way.
It also doesn’t tell us whether the shame itself is warranted. A response can have a function without the standard producing it being fair.
We can possess a very old capacity for responding to social devaluation and still have that capacity recruited by brutal cultural standards, stigma, chronic humiliation, trauma or relationships in which acceptance is made conditional.
The body does not independently decide whether the audience is reasonable, and I think this gives us a slightly different way into the question of what we actually do about shame.
Psychological writing can move quite quickly from identifying an uncomfortable response to trying to regulate it. Calm the nervous system. Correct the appraisal. Reduce the avoidance. Feel differently.
Sometimes those things are useful, but the physiological experience of shame is not necessarily evidence that our nervous system has malfunctioned. A lowered gaze is not inherently a problem, and the urge to become less visible is not incomprehensible. These responses belong to a social organism that has always had to negotiate being evaluated by other social organisms. Fun…
Understanding that doesn’t mean we have to obey the response, of course. It does mean we can ask a different question than how to make it disappear.
What is this response trying to accomplish here, and does the environment I’m in still require it?
As always, stay curious.
Shoni
Dr Shoni Marshall-Edwards
Clinical Psychologist · AHPRA PSY0004030165
Alba Psychology · Online · Australia and New Zealand