On the importance of distinguishing shame from guilt: Relations to problematic alcohol and drug use
Section snippets
Participants
Study participants were 235 college undergraduates at a large east coast public university who received course credit towards a research requirement in exchange for their participation. The students were on average 20.18 years old (SD = 5.14), about three-quarters were women (75.3%), and the sample was quite diverse in terms of racial/ethnic composition: 48.5% Caucasian, 11.1% African American, 18.7% Asian, 6.4% Latino, 5.5% Middle Eastern, and 9.8% “Other” or missing.
Alcohol and drug problems
The Alcohol Dependence
Participants
Study participants were 249 college undergraduates at a large east coast public university who received course credit towards a research requirement in exchange for their participation. The students were on average 20.11 years old (SD = 4.30), and 81.9% were women. The racial/ethnic composition of the sample was: 57.0% Caucasian, 10.8% African American, 12.4% Asian, 6.4% Latino, 3.6% Middle Eastern, and 9.6% “Other” or missing.
Alcohol and drug problems
The Alcohol Dependence (Scale B; 15 items) and Drug Dependence (Scale
Participants
Study participants were 332 pre- and post-trial inmates in a metropolitan area jail. The targeted sample was inmates who would serve at least 4 months in jail, approximated by selecting inmates who had been charged with at least one felony, and for whom bail was at least $7000. Inmate participants in Study 3 were on average 31.4 years old (SD = 9.6), mostly men (90%), and diverse in terms of racial/ethnic composition: 34.0% Caucasian, 45.9% African American, 3.3% Asian, 9.6% Latino, .7% Middle
Discussion
Results of the current studies provide evidence for a positive link between shame-proneness and problematic alcohol and drug use in two very different groups of people—undergraduates and jail inmates. In contrast, proneness to “shame-free” guilt was generally inversely related to problems with alcohol and drugs (particularly marijuana). This investigation attempted to circumvent some of the methodological difficulties of other studies by using within-group comparisons and assessment measures
Acknowledgement
This research was supported in part by a training grant (5 T32 AA07583) from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and in part by a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (5 R01 DA14694) to the third author. A subset of these results was previously presented as a poster at the 25th Annual Scientific Meeting of the Research Society on Alcoholism, June 28–July 3, 2002, San Francisco, CA. The authors would like to thank Deb Sinek for her assistance with data analysis, and
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