Since my Ph D days, I have always interested in diverse ways of people’s coping with negative emotions in their daily life and how the coping methods they choose subsequently influence their behaviour and well-being.
How do consumers cope with different negative emotions?
In this classic article, I published in the final year of my Ph D study, I reported the development of a scale intended to assess different ways of coping with negative emotions in purchase-related situations. My former advisor, Hans Baumgartner and I were interested in the possibility that people may use quite different ways of coping in response to anger, disappointment, regret, worry and sadness they experience in typical purchase or consumption situations.
You may try out the Coping with Negative Emotions in Purchase-related Situations (CNEPS) Scale below. Researchers may download the pdf of the scale as well.
Yi, S., & Baumgartner, H. (2004). Coping With Negative Emotions in Purchase-Related Situations. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 14(3), 303–317. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327663jcp1403_11
Do shoppers cope with shame differently than guilt after unplanned splurging?
A few years later, I became interested in the distinction between guilt and shame after reading June Tangney’s (2003) book entitled “Shame and Guilt”. Although similar in many ways, guilt is mainly about negative feeling about one’s specific behaviour in individual events, whereas shame is primarily about negatively evaluating one’s self in response to misdeed or shortcoming. Thus, after impulsively splurging away a lot of money on shopping tonight, while most consumers experience negative self-conscious emotions, some may experience guilt (presumably focusing on this particular buying lapse episode) and others may experience shame (presumably focusing on negative self-evaluation associated with repeated self-control problems in one’s buying). Thus, we hypothesized and found that people experiencing strong guilt are likely to use more open and constructive ways of coping, such as planning how they may reduce impulse buying in the future, than people experiencing strong shame. The latter individuals were found to use more avoidant coping strategies, such as resignation, trying to avoid thinking about what happened and what caused overspending, and blaming others. See the figure below.
You may try out the Coping with Self-conscious Emotions associated with Impulse Buying (CSEIB) Scale below. Researchers may download the pdf of the scale as well.
Yi, S., & Baumgartner, H. (2011). Coping with guilt and shame in the impulse buying context. Journal of Economic Psychology, 32(3), 458–467. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2011.03.011
Do gamblers cope with shame differently than guilt after a big loss?
We used a similar approach to assess how gamblers use different coping strategies to deal with guilt versus shame experienced after significant gambling loss.
You may try out the Coping with Gambling Loss (CGL) Scale below. Researchers may download the pdf of the scale as well.
Yi, S., & Kanetkar, V. (2011). Coping with Guilt and Shame After Gambling Loss. Journal of Gambling Studies, 27(3), 371–387. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10899-010-9216-y
Shame-prone shoppers and gamblers use avoidant coping style
Furthermore, it makes sense to predict that people may differ in chronic tendency to frequently experience shame versus guilt (i.e., shame- vs. guilt-proneness) in their daily lives. Drawing from June Tangney’s research on shame versus guilt proneness and her instrument called Test of Self-Conscious Affect (TOSCA), I found that people with high shame-proneness tend to use more avoidant and destructive coping strategies than those with high guilt-proneness after spending a lot of money on gambling or impulse shopping. This finding indicates that shame-proneness may be a personal risk factor for compulsive buying and problem gambling.
Yi, S. (2012). Shame-prone gamblers and their coping with gambling loss. Journal of Gambling Issues, 27. https://doi.org/10.4309/jgi.2012.27.7
Yi, S. (2012). Shame-Proneness as a Risk Factor of Compulsive Buying. Journal of Consumer Policy, 35(3), 393–410. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10603-012-9194-9
Collaboration: Coping with shame vs. guilt in trauma situations
Lastly, I was invited to the Sandra Erb’s Ph D thesis committee (Clinical Psychology) and contributed to the manuscripts prepared based on her doctoral thesis on the distinction between guilt and shame experienced in trauma situations.
Erb, S. R., Barata, P. C., Yi, S., McLachlan, K., & Powell, D. (2023). The shame and guilt distinction: Addressing the (mal)adaptive nature of guilt. Traumatology, 29(2), 233–248. https://doi.org/10.1037/trm0000388
Erb, S. R., Barata, P. C., Powell, D., Yi, S & MacLachlan, K. (2021). Development and validation of the Event Related Brief Shame and Guilt Scale. Forthcoming (Psychological Assessment)