Shame, trauma, temperament and psychopathology: Construct validity of the Experience of Shame Scale

Abstract

Although Experience of Shame Scale (ESS) is used in clinical research and it covers psychiatrically relevant dimensions of chronic shame, characterological (CS), behavioral (BS) and bodily (BoS) respectively, its factor structures were not confirmed on clinical sample. The goals of our research were to examine the factor structure of the Hungarian version of ESS, in addition, to analyze the associations between factors of ESS and different types of predictors, such as clinical status, gender, age, school years, early abuse history, general psychopathology (GSI), and temperament dimensions by using a series of confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) with covariates in a large clinical and matched healthy sample. Psychiatric inpatients (N=148) and healthy control subjects (N=148) participated in this cross-sectional questionnaire study. In both samples, the degree of fit was adequate. The final CFA with covariates model showed significant and positive associations between CS and clinical status and education respectively, between CS, BS, BoS and frequency of verbal abuse, between CS and BoS and GSI and between CS and BS and harm avoidance and in addition we found negative associations between each of the shame factors and age. Our results support the psychiatric validity of the ESS construct.