June Tangney

Who they are

Tangney holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from UCLA. She taught for two years at Bryn Mawr College and joined George Mason University in 1988, where she is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Psychology in Fairfax, Virginia.

Her faculty profile lists her research interests as moral emotions such as shame and guilt, criminogenic cognitions, helpful and harmful psychotherapy, values and virtues such as humility, forgiveness and self-compassion, self-control and emotion regulation, substance misuse and motivational interviewing, and computer-assisted jail-based interventions. The list shows two features of her career that matter for reading the 2014 study. She works with incarcerated samples, so her findings on shame and guilt come from people with a legal history and not from student volunteers. And she has spent decades on measurement, with scales named on her profile that include a criminogenic cognitions scale, a brief self-control scale and a body-focused shame and guilt scale.

She has also written and edited books on the subject. Shame and Guilt, written with Ronda Dearing, and Shame in the Therapy Hour, co-edited with Dearing in 2011, sit beside The Self-Conscious Emotions: Theory and Research, which she co-edited with Jess Tracy and Richard Robins in 2007, and the second edition of the Handbook of Self and Identity, co-edited with Mark Leary in 2012.

Key papers

Two faces of shame (2014)

Tangney, Stuewig and Martinez, Psychological Science, 25(3), 799-805. A longitudinal study of 476 jail inmates assessed soon after incarceration. The researchers interviewed 332 of them a year after release and obtained official arrest records for 446. Guilt-proneness directly and negatively predicted reoffending in the first year. Shame-proneness did not predict reoffending directly but predicted more of it indirectly, through a strong link to externalising blame. When shame was not offset by blame-shifting it inhibited reoffending, which is why the authors describe it as having a destructive and a constructive side. Participants were asked whether they had been re-arrested or had committed a crime that went undetected, and the answers were compared with official arrest records.

Moral emotions and moral behavior (2007)

Annual Review of Psychology. This is the review listed on her faculty profile as one of her notable publications. It was not read for this page and is recorded only as a title and a venue.

Key ideas

The central idea attached to her name is the distinction between shame and guilt as two ways of responding to wrongdoing. Guilt is directed at an act and shame at the self. The distinction is attributional, in that it turns on where the person aims the feeling, and it is measured as a tendency, called proneness, instead of an emotion on a given day.

The second idea is that shame is not one thing. In the 2014 study, shame-proneness did not predict reoffending directly. Its effect ran through blame-shifting. People who felt bad about the self and turned the feeling outward reoffended more, and those who did not were, on the authors' reading, helped by it. That finding is why this site rates the shame and guilt distinction mixed, not settled.

The third is a limit that the study itself shows. Nobody in it was publicly shamed. The inmates were assessed by questionnaire and followed after release. The paper cannot say what a public rebuke would have done to them, and this site does not use it to say so. It is used alongside two other studies, a survey of tax offenders by Kristina Murphy and Nathan Harris and a field experiment on tax delinquents by Ricardo Perez-Truglia and Ugo Troiano, to show that the evidence on shame as a trait, shame as an experience of being treated, and shame as public exposure comes from three different kinds of study.

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