ABSTRACT
The experience of shame is associated with unfulfilled expectations and is triggered by an appraisal of a disturbance in facial recognition, the most salient channel of non-verbal communication. Shame is a response to failure and to ensuing feelings of inadequacy—especially a failure when success was expected. In place of the anticipated psychobiologically energized state, the child experiences shame, which is a rapidly de-energized and painful state. For some children—and later adults—the threat of this "embarrassment" can be a pervasive feature of their interpersonal world, thereby becoming internalized as a core component of the personality. It is not always easy to entirely disentangle shame from guilt. However, in general, guilt seems to be felt in response to harmful or prohibited actions or phantasies of some actions. Shame and feelings of embarrassed self-consciousness arise when a discrepancy becomes apparent between actual self and the presented self or between the actual self and the image of the self that the other expects.
