Abstract

This study reviews how the concept of shame has been defined differently across academic fields and examines its multidimensional structure. By analyzing psychoanalytic, emotion-theoretic, phenomenological, cognitive-attributional, and functionalist approaches, the review identifies four recurrent issues in shame research: disciplinary differences in interpretation, ambiguity in distinguishing shame from related self-conscious emotions, diversity in measurement tools and the resulting limitations in cross-study comparability, and cultural variability in conceptual construction and flexibility in interpretation. The study then examines how the appraisal-feeling-motivation model proposed by Gausel and Leach (2011) provides theoretical responses to these issues. The model distinguishes self-defect appraisal from other-condemnation appraisal, separates shame from inferiority and rejection, and demonstrates how specific appraisal-feeling combinations are linked to either improvement motivation or defensive motivation. Through this analysis, the review conceptualizes shame not as a single emotion but as a sequence of multidimensional appraisal-feeling-motivation processes that collectively constitute the experience of shame. Overall, the study reorganizes the conceptual landscape of shame and offers an integrative foundation for future theoretical and empirical research.