Pride and shame in university students: The role of setting

Moral emotions can be defined as those emotions “linked to the interests or welfare either of society as a whole or at least of persons other than the judge or agent” (Haidt, 2003, p. 853). Among them, pride and shame–categorized also as achievement emotions by the control-value theory (Pekrun, 2006)–have been poorly investigated by the psychological literature (Lewis, 2011). Our primary aim was to explore whether pride and shame are organized in a setting-specific manner, on the basis of their documented domain-specificity. Our second aim was to explore differences in the levels of pride and shame in the two settings. The participants were 666 university students attending the Faculty of Education at the University of Verona. They evaluated pride and shame referred to learning exam-relevant material and taking exams, on a 7-point Likert-type scale. For each emotion, three words were presented. All α-values were good. Confirmatory factor analyses and an analysis of variance were conducted. First, we found that the two emotions are not organized in a setting-specific manner: In other words, it is more probable that levels of pride and shame generalize from one setting to the other, rather than they are similar in different settings. Second, we documented differences between the two moral emotions and between the two settings. On the one hand, the positive emotion of pride was higher than the negative emotion of shame, extending previous literature (Raccanello, Brondino, & De Bernardi, 2013) and suggesting a certain level of wellbeing associated with learning environments. On the other hand, pride was higher for the non-evaluative setting, while shame was higher for the evaluative setting, as expected according to the definitions of the two emotions. Such knowledge has also an applied relevance as a basis for planning interventions to improve affect characterizing learning contexts.