But what situation is guaranteed to elicit pride or shame, guilt or embarrassment? These emotions are so dependent on a person's own experience, expectations, and culture, that it is difficult to design uniform experiments.
Some psychoanalysts, notably Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson, argued that there must be some universal elicitors of shame, such as failure at toilet training or exposure of the backside. But the idea of an automatic noncognitive elicitor does not make much sense. Cognitive processes are likely to be the elicitors of these complex emotions. It is the way people think or what they think about that becomes the elicitor of pride, shame, guilt, or embarrassment. There may be a one-to-one correspondence between certain thoughts and certain emotions; however, in the case of self-conscious emotions, the elicitor is a cognitive event. This does not mean that the earlier primary emotions are elicited by noncognitive events. Cognitive factors may play a role in eliciting any emotion, but the nature of the cognitive events is much less articulated and differentiated in the primary than in the self-conscious emotions.
Those who study self-conscious emotions have begun to determine the role of the self in such emotions, and in particular the age at which the notion of self emerges in childhood.
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