Shame On You,Shame On Me? Nussbaum on Shame Punishment

abstract Shame punishments have become an increasingly popular alternative to traditional punishments, often taking the form of convicted criminals holding signs or sweeping streets with a toothbrush. In her Hiding from Humanity, Martha Nussbaum argues against the use of shame punishments because they contribute to an offender's loss of dignity. However, these concerns are shared already by the courts which also have concerns about the possibility that shaming might damage an offender's dignity. This situation has not led the courts to reject all uses of shaming, but only to accept shaming within certain safeguards. Thus, despite Nussbaum's important reservations against shame punishments, it may still be possible for her to accept shaming within specific parameters such as those set out by the courts that protect the dignity of an offender. As a result, she need not be opposed to the use of legitimate shame punishment.     

Comments on “Shame and Shame Dynamics” Special Issue,Edited by Benjamin Kilborne

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

College Students and Community Service: Who,With Whom,and Why?

The community service volunteer vs. nonvolunteer status of 124 college students was examined in relation to motivation, gender, extraversion-introversion, and social anxiety. Volunteers and female students were hypothesized to have higher levels of motivation to participate than were nonvolunteers and males, and to have higher levels of interest in volunteering. The data for volunteer status and gender were significant only with respect to interest in volunteering, with volunteers and females significantly more interested in volunteering than were nonvolunteers and males. Gender differences were also found for volunteering style preference and participation within particular volunteer groups. Volunteers were also hypothesized to have lower levels of extraversion and higher levels of social anxiety than nonvolunteers because socially anxious introverts were thought to seek the anxiety-reducing structure of a volunteer activity. This hypothesis was not supported.     

Communication Using Camera Phones Among Young Men and Women: Who Sends What to Whom?

This study examined whether the gender of the sender and recipient would influence camera phone usage. 180 college and university students from the Midlands and North of England provided information on communication with friends and family, and on personal importance of image uses. A sub-sample of 130 provided further data on likelihood of sending different kinds of image and the content of recent images sent and received. Many gender similarities were found, together with evidence of the use of images to support heterosexual relationships. However, the results showed greater use of images of significant individuals by the women than among their male counterparts, among all-female dyads and to communicate with female recipients. Overall the results suggest that women use images more than men for relationship maintenance.     

Marital Breakdown,Shame, and Suicidality in Men: A Direct Link?

The influence of feelings of shame originating from marital breakdown on suicidality is examined. The role of mental health problems as probable mediating factors is also considered. Internalized shame, state (related to separation) shame, and mental health problems were significantly correlated with the score for suicidality during separation in both genders. Tested structural equation model indicated that internalized shame was not directly linked to suicidality, but was mediated either by state shame or mental health problems in males in the context of separation. Our findings seem to indicate that separated males are more vulnerable to the experience of state shame in the context of separation, which might lead to the development of suicidality.     

Communication and Performance in Co-Located and Distributed Teams: An Issue of Shared Mental Models of Team Members?

The aim of the present study was to test whether the shared mental models of team members have an effect on team performance, communication, and physical arousal in two distributed teams in pursuit of a common goal. A sample (N = 15) of newly formed navy teams was compared with a sample (N = 13) of seasoned navy teams. The results showed that familiar teams displayed higher performance levels, faster reaction times, more accuracy, and greater mission success compared to unfamiliar teams. A significant shift in communication strategy and physiological response (heart rate) was observed between the teams and from baseline to low workload. Implications for team training are discussed.     

Treating Patients with Symptoms—and Symptoms with Patience: Reflections on Shame,Dissociation, and Eating Disorders

I offer the view that the symptom picture found in most patients with eating disorders, as well as in the symptomatology of many other so-called difficult patients, is the end result of prolonged necessity in infancy to control traumatic dysregulation of affect. I propose that the central issue for an eating-disordered patient is that she is at the mercy of her own physiologic and affective states because she lacks an experience of human relatedness and its potential for reparation that mediates self-regulation. She is enslaved by her felt inability to contain desire as a regulatable affect and is thus unable to hold desire long enough to make choices without the loss of the thing not chosen leading to a dread of self-annihilation. Trauma compromises trust in the reparability of relationship, and for symptoms to be surrendered, trust in reparability must be simultaneously restored. Because felt desire is the mortal enemy of an eating-disordered patient, this fact becomes a central dynamic in the analytic field, leading analyst and patient into a struggle over who shall hold the desire and whether the issue of control over food is allowed to become a subject for negotiation. I discuss the inevitability of the analyst's own dissociative reactions in response to the patient's internal war over desire and control, and the different types of interpersonal enactments into which an analyst is drawn. In this tension, as illustrated through clinical vignettes, analyst and patient slip in and out of a constantly shifting array of self-states and thereby have an opportunity to coconstruct a transitional reality within which the patient's impaired faith in the reliability of human relatedness can be restored, and eating can become linked to appetite rather than to self-protection.     

Shame and Depressive Symptoms: Self-compassion and Contingent Self-worth as Mediators?

Research has identified the experience of shame as a relevant predictor of depressive symptoms. Building upon resilience theory, this is the first study to investigate if self-compassion and/or contingent self-worth (i.e., family support and God’s love) mediate the link between shame and depressive symptoms. Participants were 109 African Americans, within the age range of 18 and 64, who sought service following a suicide attempt from a public hospital that serves mostly low-income patients. Findings suggest that shame was related to depressive symptoms through self-compassion but not through contingent self-worth, underscoring the significant role that self-compassion plays in ameliorating the aggravating effect of shame on depressive symptoms. Results highlight the value of incorporating self-compassion training into interventions for suicidal African Americans in an effort to reduce the impact of shame on their depressive symptoms and ultimately their suicidal behavior and as a result enhance their capacity for resilience.     

Threat to Whom? Conflict,Consensus, and Social Control

A number of observers have questioned the efficacy of model specifications designed to falsify the conflict perspective of crime control. Exploiting the quasi-experimental qualities of Cincinnati's recent race-related riot, this study employs interrupted time series techniques to evaluate a component of conflict theory, the racial threat hypothesis. In brief, the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) transfer function models indicate that, upon controlling for the potentially confounding effects of robbery offenses, the April 2001 riot led to a lasting increase in the level of robbery arrests. The implications of this investigation for distinguishing between the predictions of conflict and consensus theories of crime control are discussed.     

Ebola ‘Done Done’—But What Has It Left Behind?

Sierra Leone, a country that has been recovering from a brutal civil war, was in 2014 struck by a new crisis in the Ebola epidemic. This article reports on interviews and repertory grids completed by two groups of people who had been affected by the epidemic: amputee footballers who had lost family members or friends, and burial workers. The interviews and grids are analyzed in terms of the professional constructs of personal construct psychology, highlighting the anxiety, threat, guilt, and shame experienced by the participants; similarities in their construing of the Ebola epidemic and the civil war; and their positive anticipations of the future.     

Challenging the Universality of Job Resources: Why,When, and For Whom Are They Beneficial?

In this paper we introduce the topic of job resources and elaborate on their relevance for research and practice in work psychology. We start out with a brief overview of the historic and current understanding of job resources. Next, we discuss the need for a more nuanced perspective on the effects of job resources and present some ideas on how to move this forward. After these conceptual preliminaries, we introduce the papers in the special issue and conclude with a brief summary of the special issue's key messages.