Self-blame is a cognitive process in which an individual attributes the occurrence of a stressful event to oneself. The direction of blame often has implications for individuals' emotions and behaviors during and following stressful situations. Self-blame is a common reaction to stressful events and has certain effects on how individuals adapt. Types of self-blame are hypothesized to contribute to depression, and self-blame is a component of self-directed emotions like guilt and self-disgust. Because of self-blame's commonality in response to stress and its role in emotion, self-blame should be examined using psychology's perspectives on stress and coping.
Self-blame and stress While conceptualizations of stress have differed, the most dominant accounts in current psychology are appraisal-based models of stress. These models define stress as a reaction to a certain type of subjective appraisal, done by an individual, of the circumstances he or she is in. Specifically, stress occurs when an individual decides that a factor in the environment puts demands on the individual beyond his or her current ability to deal with it. The process of rating situations as demanding or nondemanding is called appraisal, and this process can occur quickly and without conscious awareness. Appraisal models of stress are sometimes called "interactional" because the occurrence of stress depends on an interaction between characteristics of the person, especially goals, and the environmental situation. Only if the individual perceives a situation to threaten his or her goals does stress occur. This structure explains the fact that individuals often differ in their emotional and stress responses when they are presented with similar situations. Stress does not come from events themselves, but from the conflict of the event with an individual's goals. While researchers disagree about the time-course of appraisals, how appraisals are made, and the degree to which individuals differ in their appraisals, appraisal-models of stress are dominant in psychology. Appraisals may occur without conscious awareness. Stress itself is a systemic psychological state that includes a subjective "feel" and a motivational-component (the individual desires to reduce stress); some researchers consider stress to be a subset of or a closely related system to emotions, which likewise depend on appraisal and motivate behavior. Once this appraisal has occurred, actions taken to reduce stress constitute coping processes. Coping can involve changes to the situation-environment relationship (changing the situation or the goals that led to stress appraisal), reducing the emotional consequences of a stress appraisal, or avoiding thinking about the stressful situation. Categorizations of types of coping vary between researchers. Coping strategies differ in their effects on subjective well-being; for example, positive reappraisal is consistently found to be a correlate of higher subjective-well being, while distraction from stressors is typically a negative correlate of well-being. Coping behaviors constitute the moderating factor between events and circumstances on one hand and psychological outcomes, like well-being or mental disorders, on the other. Causal attributions of the event are a way to deal with the stress of an event, and so self-blame is a type of coping. During and after traumatic events, individuals' appraisals affect how stressful the event is, their beliefs on what caused the event, meanings they may derive from the event, and changes they make in their future behavior.
Theories of self-blame
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