David C. Rubin

Shame, tonic immobility, and passive reactions to stressful events are phylogenetically conserved, obligatory, submissive defense reactions. Behavior, biology, genetics, evolutionary theories, and theories of humans as ultra-social animals are integrated to expand the understanding of these defense reactions in ways that are missing from current theories. In Study 1, 445 undergraduates selected the event that caused them the most shame, the event that produced their greatest inability to move or speak, and the stressful event that bothered them the most. Event-specific measures included the severity, centrality to identity, and effects of the event. In Study 2, 300 of these participants answered individual-differences measures. In Study 3, 350 Prolific workers rated the same events and the events that produced the most verbal disagreement and the most pride, control events that involved fewer phylogenetically conserved, obligatory, submissive defense reactions. The added events generally produced the lower effects as predicted. Preregistered predictions of a high degree of similarity among shame, tonic immobility, and reactions to stressful events were supported, including similar correlations among event-specific measures in each type of event, between the same event-specific measures across event types, and between event-specific and individual-differences measures. For factors involving shame, tonic immobility, and reactions to stressful events, this framework increases scientific understanding and offers support to individuals who are left to interpret their responses as signs of personal weaknesses. Such factors include sexual assault, genocide, war, race, religion, ethnicity, gender, addiction, poverty, and professional duties. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Narrative identity - how individuals narrate their lived and remembered past - is usually assessed via independent rater coding, but new methods relying on self-report have been introduced. To test the assumption that different methods assess aspects of the same underlying construct, studies measuring similar components of narrative identity with different methods are needed. However, such studies are surprisingly rare. To begin to fill this gap, the present study compared the narrative variables, temporal coherence, causal coherence, and thematic coherence, measured via rater coding of participants' self-generated narratives of the remembered past and via subscales of the self-report measure Awareness of Narrative Identity Questionnaire (ANIQ). The results showed that the ANIQ subscales did not correlate significantly with their corresponding rater-coded dimension, and that the ANIQ subscales were generally unrelated to the other rater-coded dimensions. Furthermore, an exploratory factor analysis demonstrated that the ANIQ subscales loaded together on a factor that did not include any rater-coded variables. The findings suggest that the narrative variables share little empirical overlap when assessed via the ANIQ and rater coding of self-generated narratives.

We extend Conway's self-memory system by adding theory and data from shame, an emotion that disrupts the internalised ideals of society needed for a positive self-concept. The event that caused 273 undergraduates their greatest amount of shame was analyzed; 66% were not very negative except for producing shame. Ratings of post-event effects, including two measure of self (self-perceived weakness, and centrality to identity) and four clinical symptoms (intrusions, avoidance, anxiety, and depression), were attributed separately to the remembered event, behaviour during the event, and shame from the event. The effects of shame were generally as large as the those of the event and larger than those of the behaviour, demonstrating the importance of shame's effects. The Tonic Immobility Scale (TIS), which measures tonic immobility (i.e., freezing), was obtained for the event that produced the most tonic immobility but that was not the event that caused the most shame. The post-event symptoms measured on the event that caused the most shame and the TIS correlated highly, suggesting that shame and tonic immobility may belong to a cluster of phylogenetically conserved submissive defensive mechanisms that could account for effects currently attributed to goals in self-memory systems.

Narrative identity refers to a person's internalized and evolving life story. It is a rapidly growing research field, motivated by studies showing a unique association with well-being. Here we show that this association disappears when controlling for the emotional valence of the stories told and individuals' general experience of autobiographical memory. Participants (N = 235) wrote their life story and completed questionnaires on their general experience of autobiographical memory and several dimensions of well-being and affect. Participants' life stories were coded for standard narrative identity variables, including agency and communion. When controlling for emotional valence of the life story, the general experience of autobiographical memory was a significant predictor of most well-being measures, whereas agency was a predictor of one variable only and communion of none. These findings contradict the claim of an incremental association between narrative identity and well-being, and have important theoretical and practical implications for narrative identity as an outcome measure in interventions.

I propose a model that places episodic, semantic, and other commonly studied forms of memory into the same conceptual space. The space is defined by three