Shame: when emotion and reasoning are linked

Abstract

Some emotions, described as "basic" in the literature, are almost reflexes. Other emotions are triggered via pattern matching mechanisms operating on specific mental states (most often epistemic and motivational) to determine the (in)congruence of these states. Yet other emotions come from more or less complex cognitive mechanisms (and we thus call them complex emotions) such as counterfactual reasoning (e.g. guilt or regret), normative judgement (e.g. shame or pride), probabilistic evaluations of the world (e.g. surprise), etc.. In the following, we study and formalise the complex emotion of shame that is of particular importance in social behaviour, and illustrate it on some scenarios.