Humiliated Fury is not universal: Studying the co-occurrence of anger and shame in the US and Japan

Humiliated fury is experienced when individuals turn their shame into anger, which has been explained from the painful nature of shame. This paper challenges the universality of humiliated fury, and proposes that shame is turned into anger to the extent it is culturally devalued. In two cross-cultural studies (U.S. and Japan), we examined cultural variation in humiliated fury by comparing links between anger and shame in shameful situations, using multilevel regression. In a daily-diary study, participants recalled their emotional experiences during shame situations over a week. In a second vignette study, participants then reported their emotional experience in response to standardized shame situation vignettes sampled from the U.S. and Japan. In both studies, shame consistently predicted anger for American participants, but Japanese participants only showed signs of humiliated fury when presented with American situations. Therefore, humiliated fury is better understood from the cultural value than some inherent quality of shame.status: publishe