Emotion without a word: shame and guilt among Rarámuri Indians and rural Javanese.

ABSTRACT

The Rarámuri Indians in Mexico use 1 word for guilt and shame. In this article, the authors show that the Rarámuri nevertheless differentiate between shame and guilt characteristics, similar to cultural populations that use 2 words for these emotions. Emotion-eliciting situations were collected among the Rarámuri and among rural Javanese and were rated on shame and guilt by Dutch and Indonesian students. These ratings were used to select 18 shame-eliciting and guilt-eliciting situations as stimuli. The Rarámuri (N = 229) and the Javanese (N = 213) rated the situations on 29 emotion characteristics that previously had been found to differentiate shame from guilt in an international student sample. For most characteristics, a pattern of differentiation similar to that found among the students was found for both the Javanese and the Rarámuri.