Shame Regulation in Learning: A Double-Edged Sword

Previous research and classroom practices have focused on dispelling shame, assuming that it negatively impacts self-efficacy and performance, and overlook the potential for shame to facilitate learning. To investigate this gap, we designed an intervention with 132 tertiary education students (45.46% male, 64.4% European ethnicity) spanning diverse undergraduate majors to show how and why designing for experiences of shame and appropriately regulating them can differentially impact learning. Shame was induced through autobiographical recall, imagination, and failure-driven problem-solving before randomly assigning students to three conditions: two with explicit tips for either decreasing shame or maintaining shame (experimental groups) and one with no-regulation tips (control). Students worked on an introductory data science problem deliberately designed to lead to failure before receiving canonical instruction. Manipulation checks triangulating self-reported and facial expression analysis data suggested that shame was successfully regulated in the intended direction, depending on the condition. Our results, drawing on mixed-methods analyses, further suggested that relative to students decreasing shame, those who maintained shame during initial problem-solving had (i) similar post-test performance on a non-isomorphic question and improved performance on the transfer question, evidenced by accuracy in solving applied data science and inference tasks; (ii) complete reasoning across all post-test questions, as evidenced by elaborations justifying the usage of graphical and numerical representations across those tasks; and (iii) use of superior emotion regulation strategies focused on deploying attention to the problem and reappraising its inherently challenging nature with an approach orientation, as evidenced by a higher frequency of such codes derived from self-reported qualitative data during the intervention. Decreasing shame was as effective as not engaging in explicit regulation. Our results suggest that teaching efforts should be channeled to facilitate experiencing emotions that are conducive to goals, whether they feel pleasurable or not, which may inevitably involve emoting both positive and negative (e.g., shame) in moderation. However, it is paramount that emotional experiences are not merely seen by educators as tools for improved content learning but as an essential part of holistic student development. We advocate for the deliberate design of learning experiences that support, rather than overshadow, students’ emotional growth.