Research on shame and guilt has mainly been conducted in individualistic Western cultures. Some qualitative research, however, examined shame and guilt experiences in Chinese culture. Bedford (2004) identified 7 terms that represent emotional experiences of “shame” and “guilt.” We report 3 studies examining Mandarin Chinese speakers’ recalled experiences of negative self-conscious emotions and their related appraisals and motivations. Results reveal that instead of categorizing negative self-conscious emotion terms into 2 superordinate categories of “shame” and “guilt,” 3 clusters are more suitable based on their correlations and associated characteristics. Implications for cross-cultural studies on self-conscious emotions are discussed
