An Empirical Study On The Relationship Of Guilt And Shame About Middle-school Students

As of the human highly socialized negative self-moral and emotional experience, guilt and shame are the appraisal and cognition product that the individual experiences ill events, they are as well very important factors affecting the individual following behaviors, and have extremely close relationship with the individual physically and mentally healthy and the social development. The relational research about guilt and shame has been the hot topic of domestic and foreign psychologists for the last ten years. Guilt and shame have many similarities, but more psychological researches are focused on their difference, more and more researches reveal their huge difference in conception, cognition appraisal, emotional experience, behavior performance and psychological pathology. At the same time, paying attention to relations between some main variables and guilt and shame also has the very noticeable role to make a better understanding of negative moods. As the core of personality, self-esteem is the instinctive need to individual, and realizes the harmonious adjustment among various needs. Presently the western scholars think that self-esteem is the emotional experience based on the judgment to self-value. Attributional style is the important constituent of individual self-cognition, and is the individual appraisal basis. American, the individualist culture representative, favors to use individual inner reasons to explain the social events' occurrence, but Chinese, the collectivism culture representative, favors to use environment or external reasons to explain the social events' occurrence. This research explores the relationship of guilt and shame about middle-school students using qualitative and quantitative method, and get the structure equation model about self-esteem and attributional style and guilt and shame using the self-report method and the interview method, hoping to contribute on the guilt and shame theory research and middle-school students' morality construction. This study consists of one preparatory and two series researches. The results are as follows:1. The hypothesises of "public and personal" and "injuring self and injuring the other" are also applicable to China middle-school students community;2. Middle-school students' guilt and shame have significant differences. There is a key time from the same to difference, and this key time is approximately in the third grade;3. Self-esteem is the intermediary variable of attributional style and guilt and shame. The direct impact of attributional style to self-esteem is stronger than the direct impact of attributional style to guilt and shame, and the indirect impact of attributional style to guilt and shame is stronger than the direct impact;4. Individual attributional style to the guilt and shame events is different to the positive events, and individual tends to use inner reasons to explain the guilt events, and tends to use external reasons to explain the shame events;5. The hypothesis of "regret and face" is existing, namely, the individual usually feels regretting after experiencing the guilt events, but usually feels losing face after experiencing the shame events.