Conceptualising pride, shame, guilt, humiliation and embarrassment

This chapter critically reviews the field of emotion theory and locates the different ideas relating to pride, shame and other self-conscious emotions within this. It is argued that a constructionist approach to emotions offers the most useful way of conceptualising emotions generally, and the self-conscious emotions more specifically, yet it also identifies that there is no agreement within the broad field of constructionism on what these self-conscious emotions are and how to research them. This chapter, therefore, synthesises a range of constructionist ideas to outline a new framework for theorising and researching the self-conscious emotions in professional practice.