Self-conscious emotions

Self-conscious emotions, such as guilt, shame, embarrassment, and pride, are a variety of social emotions that relate to our sense of self and our consciousness of others' reactions to us. During the second year of life, new emotions begin to emerge when children gain the understanding that they themselves are entities distinct from other people and begin to develop a sense of self. These emotions include: Shame Pride Guilt Envy Embarrassment Self-conscious emotions have been shown to have social benefits. These include areas such as reinforcing social behaviors and reparation of social errors. There is also possible research suggesting that a lack of self-conscious emotion is a contributing cause of bad behaviour. They have five distinct features that differentiate them from other emotions: Require self-awareness and self representation Emerge later than basic emotions Facilitate attainment of complex social goals Do not have distinct universally recognized facial expressions Cognitively complex Self-conscious emotions are among the latter of emotions to develop. Two reasons are at the cause of this: Emotions such as joy, fear and sadness can all be gathered reliantly on just a person’s face. However self-conscious emotions heavily involve the body in addition to the face (Darwin, 1965). This means that when humans are attempting to learn self-conscious emotions, they have more to tend to, making the emotions harder to grasp. Due to the nature of these emotions, they can only begin to form once an individual has the capacity to self-evaluate their own actions. If the individual decides that they have caused a situation to occur, they then must decide if the situation was a success or a failure based on the social norms they have accrued, then attach the appropriate self-conscious feeling (Weiner, 1986). This is a complex cognitive skill, one that takes time to master. As stated, self-conscious emotions are complex and harder to learn than basic emotions such as happiness or fear. This premise also has biological backing.