Additional validity evidence for the Harder Personal Feelings Questionnaire-2 (PFQ2): a measure of shame and guilt proneness.

The present study sought to provide additional evidence for the construct validity of the Harder (Harder & Zalma, 1990) Personal Feelings Questionnaire-2 (PFQ2), a recently revised measure of shame and guilt proneness. Seventy university students, 35 male and 35 female, completed the PFQ2 and scales that assess self-derogation, instability of self-concept, shyness, social anxiety, public self-consciousness, private self-consciousness, and locus of control. The correlation results were generally consistent with validity predictions. As in previous studies, however, the discriminant validity of the shame and guilt scales was supported, but not strongly.

Assessment of shame and guilt and their relationships to psychopathology.

Two studies are reported. First, we tested the previously validated Personal Feelings Questionnaire-2 (PFQ2; Harder & Zalma, 1990) shame and guilt measure and the Adapted Shame and Guilt Scale (ASGS; Hoblitzelle, 1982) Shame subscale against the newly introduced Self-Conscious Affect and Attribution Inventory (SCAAI; Tangney, 1990) for shame and guilt dispositions. Fifty-nine college undergraduates completed randomly ordered personality inventories reflecting constructs theoretically relevant to the presence of shame and guilt proneness. Correlations between the affect measures and personality variables showed evidence of validity for all shame scales. The PFQ2 Guilt subscale also demonstrated construct validity when partialled for shame, but the SCAAI did not. Second, we tested hypotheses regarding the relative importance of shame and guilt to various symptom types (Symptom Checklist-90-Revised; Derogatis, 1983) using 71 college undergraduates. Both emotions were approximately equally related to all major symptom clusters, but there was some evidence for differential patterns of relative importance for shame and guilt to different symptoms.