ABSTRACT
Siegel highlights the enormous importance of affiliative and compassionate caring, especially in early life, for its development. Socially, while threat and feeling threatened can result in segregated and stereotypic responses, and in the extreme cause dis-integration and dissociation, compassion can provide for a sense of safeness. The relationship between motives-intentions, feeling states and emotions are complex with major implications for compassion. Shame and guilt are both important self-conscious emotions but they have very different evolutionary origins, underpinning motivational systems and links to compassion. Viewing compassion as a social mentality, rooted in caring motivation, reveals the important differences between shame and guilt. Shame and guilt also have different relations to a core issue of compassion which is the avoidance of causing suffering. Emerging from caring motivation, combined with human social intelligences, compassion is one of a range of prosocial processes which can be extended to kin and non-kin depending on context – but group boundaries can be an obstacle.
