Empathy and the Self-Absorption Paradox II: Self-Rumination and Self-Reflection as Mediators Between Shame, Guilt, and Empathy

The present study tested the hypothesis that proneness to shame would predict self-rumination (and personal distress) whereas proneness to guilt would predict self-reflection (and perspective taking, and empathic concern). Results supported the majority of these predictions, and revealed that self-reflection mediates the relationship between guilt and perspective taking. Additional results provided some support for the hypothesis that self-rumination mediates the relationship between shame and personal distress. However, results also revealed that shame mediated the relationship between self-rumination and personal distress, suggesting that shame and self-rumination may feed each other within a reciprocal cycle that is likely to result in a maladaptive empathic response (i.e., personal distress). Empathic concern was associated with higher levels of guilt, but results failed to replicate earlier findings demonstrating a positive relationship between empathic concern and self-reflection. The present results replicate and extend past research and suggest several promising avenues for future research. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Matt Beeble and Maria Apostolou for their help with the data collection. Notes In this article, guilt is hypothesized to be linked with self-reflection rather than self-rumination. On the surface, this prediction may appear inconsistent with previous work which has found that guilt is associated with "rumination" (Lewis, ; Lindsay-Hartz, ; Tangney, ). This latter type of rumination, however, is distinct from the type of self-rumination under investigation in the current study. In the current study, self-rumination refers to rumination about the self, which is hypothesized to be related to shame. In previous research linking guilt and "rumination," the rumination focused on aspects of the situation, rather than the global self. In an exploratory vein, additional analyses were conducted to assess whether self-reflection and guilt would interact to predict empathic concern and perspective taking, and whether self-rumination and shame would interact to predict personal distress. None of these interactions was significant (ps > .15). One potential (methodological) explanation for the present pattern of results (i.e., support for the self-attention as mediator models) is that the content of the empathy scales is more similar to the content in the self-rumination and self-reflection scales than in the measures of shame and guilt. A close inspection of the various measures, however, suggests that if anything the empathy scales are (conceptually) more similar to the shame and guilt measures than to the self-rumination and self-reflection measures, as the former largely involve considering how one might react in situations of interpersonal conflict, whereas the self-rumination and self-reflection scales deal more directly with the individual's focus on him/herself apart from any explicit or implicit interpersonal context. Thus, based on a visual inspection of the measures, this methodological explanation seems unlikely.