Shame, embarrassment and guilt: Corpus evidence for the cross-cultural structure of social emotions

Abstract This article is a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic comparison of three interrelated emotional categories of shame, embarrassment and guilt in two different cultural settings of individualistic societies, as represented here by Britain and America, and a collectivist society, such as Poland. The conceptual field of SHAME is operationalized through its three near-synonymous adjectival exponents, "ashamed"/"zawstydzony", "embarrassed"/"zażenowany", and "guilty"/"winny". Drawing on relevant research in social and cognitive psychology as well as linguistics, the present study applies advanced quantitative corpus-based methodology to reconstruct the cultural and conceptual profiles of the three emotions.