Emotion has long been recognized in sociology as crucially important, but most references to it are generalized and vague. In this essay, I nominate shame, specifically, as the premier social emotion. First I review the individualized treatment of shame in psychoanalysis and psychology, and the absence of social context. Then I consider the contributions to the social dimensions of shame by six sociologists (Georg Simmel, Charles Cooley, Norbert Elias, Richard Sennett, Helen Lynd, Erving Goffman) and a psychologist/psychoanalyst (Helen Lewis). I show that Cooley and Lynd, particularly, made contributions to a theory of shame and the social bond. Lewis's idea that shame arises from threats to the bond integrates the contributions of all six sociologists, and points toward future research on emotion, conflict, and alienation/integration.

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This article proposes that shame is the master emotion of everyday life but is usually invisible in modern societies because of taboo. A review of shame studies suggests a taboo that results in denial and silence. The studies by Cooley, Freud, Elias, Lynd, Goffman, Lewis, and Tomkins have been largely ignored. Their work suggests a vital connection between shame and social life: shame can be seen as a signal of a threat to the bond. If so, understanding shame would be necessary for the study of social systems. The taboo on shame in English still holds: current usage, for the most part, assigns an intense and narrow singular meaning. This meaning offends, on the one hand, and misses the everyday function of shame, on the other. Perhaps the problem can be approached, as it is in traditional societies, by the use of a broader term, such as "bond affect" or "Shame. " Such a concept could lead to discovery of the emotional/ relational world.

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In 1975, Arlie Hochschild published her influential essay, "The Sociology of Feelings and Emotions," arguing that sociology's emphasis on the cognitive, rational actor neglected an important dimension of social life. In the two decades that have elapsed since that publication, an entirely new area of sociology-the sociology of emotions-has emerged, underscoring the significant role emotions play in social relationships. One of the important conceptual developments in this area is Thomas Scheff' s social psychological account of the "shame-rage spiral" (Scheff 1987(Scheff , 1990. For Scheff, shame is a "master emotion" in determining social encounters, and shame that goes unacknowledged can lead to the disruption of social bonds. His new book, Emotions, the Social Bond, and Human Reality, builds upon this conception, emphasizing the methodological dimension of his contribution-what he calls a "padwhole analysis."Empirically, Scheff's analysis begins with exchanges between individuals in discourse. (By discourse, he is referring to spoken language as well as nonverbal gestures and other communicative expressions.) An exchange is a "part/whole ladder of levels" (p. 5). For example, an exchange between a mother and her daughter is made up of smaller parts: the words and gestures of each expression between them. Each exchange, in turn, is part of a still larger whole: the conversation of which it is a part, all conversations between the two participants, and all relationships of this particular social type (i.e., mother-daughter relationships). Scheff contends that careful attention to parts and their relations to larger social and cultural wholes will overcome many of the limitations in social science research, particularly the gap he sees between empirical and theoretical work.To flesh out his methodological paradigm, Scheff reanalyzes verbatim transcripts from previous studies to illuminate the contributions of his approach. These include works of fiction (the novels of Jane Austen and the plays of Shakespeare) as well as studies of relationships between parents and children in dysfunctional families, the talk of girls and boys in the inner city, discourse in a psychiatric interview, and finally, correspondence between heads of state prior to World War I. His point throughout is to show how small parts-sentences and language-are part of larger social wholes with an empirical emphasis on the emergence of feelings such as shame, pride, and anger.Symbolic Interaction 22(1): 97-99