To be able to provide an analysis of professional practice from the perspective of pride and shame, we have to be clear on what we mean by the terms. While we all hold common-sense knowledge about these emotions, and therefore have little problem in understanding what someone means when they say ‘I feel ashamed’, for example, such ‘folk theories’, as D’Andrade (1987) refers to them, fail to provide an adequate definition for the purposes of research. Yet, despite over a hundred years of theorising and researching (eg Darwin, 1872; Cooley, 1902; Lynd, 1958; Goffman, 1959; Freud, 1962 [1905]; Lewis, 1971; Scheff, 2000), there remains a healthy academic debate regarding the nature of these emotional experiences, with no agreed-upon construct that can be applied unproblematically to research and practice.

This chapter critically reviews the field of emotion theory and locates the different ideas relating to pride, shame and other self-conscious emotions within this. As will be discussed, however, not all theories and ideas about these emotions are able to account for the biological, physiological, psychological, social and cultural components of the experience, or adequately explain the findings derived from research studies. I argue that a constructionist approach to emotions offers the most useful way of conceptualising emotions generally, and the self-conscious emotions more specifically, yet I also identify that there is no agreement within the broad field of constructionism on what these self-conscious emotions are and how to research them. This chapter, therefore, synthesises a range of constructionist ideas to outline a new framework for theorising and researching the self-conscious emotions in professional practice.

Foundations of emotion concepts

Thoits's (1989: 318) review of emotion theory states that ‘there are almost as many definitions of emotions as there are authors’. Yet, despite the complexity of the field, Gendron and Barrett (2009) broadly categorise conceptions of emotions into three differing foundations: emotions as basic entities, as appraisals or as constructions. Each provides a different way of perceiving what an emotion is and, therefore, provides different ways of explaining and predicting emotional experience. While Gendron and Barrett’s (2009) categorisation of models of emotion is a useful starting point to explore emotion theory, not all theories, or theorists, will fit neatly into such categories.