The synchronized co-activation of multiple responses—motivational, behavioral, and physiological—has been taken as a defining feature of emotion. Such response coherence has been observed inconsistently however, and this has led some to view emotion programs as lacking biological reality. Yet, response coherence is not always expected or desirable if an emotion program is to carry out its adaptive function. Rather, the hallmark of emotion is the capacity to orchestrate multiple mechanisms adaptively—responses will co-activate in stereotypical fashion or not depending on how the emotion orchestrator interacts with the situation. Nevertheless, might responses cohere in the general case where input variables are specified minimally? Here we focus on shame as a case study. We measure participants’ responses regarding each of 27 socially devalued actions and personal characteristics. We observe internal and external coherence: The intensities of felt shame and of various motivations of shame (hiding, lying, destroying evidence, and threatening witnesses) vary in proportion (i) to one another, and (ii) to the degree to which audiences devalue the disgraced individual—the threat shame defends against. These responses cohere both within and between the United States and India. Further, alternative explanations involving the low-level variable of arousal do not seem to account for these results, suggesting that coherence is imparted by a shame system. These findings indicate that coherence can be observed at multiple levels and raise the possibility that emotion programs orchestrate responses, even in those situations where coherence is low.

多种反应（动机、行为和生理）的同步共同激活已被视为情绪的一个定义特征。然而，这种反应一致性的观察并不一致，这导致一些人认为情绪程序缺乏生物学现实。然而，如果情绪程序要执行其适应性功能，则反应一致性并不总是预期或理想的。相反，情绪的标志是适应性地协调多种机制的能力——反应是否会以刻板的方式共同激活，取决于情绪协调者如何与情况互动。然而，在输入变量被最小程度指定的一般情况下，响应是否会一致？在这里，我们重点关注羞耻作为案例研究。我们测量了参与者对 27 种被社会贬低的行为和个人特征的反应。我们观察内部和外部的连贯性：感到羞耻和各种羞耻动机（隐藏、撒谎、毁灭证据和威胁证人）的强度按以下比例变化：（i）彼此之间的比例，以及（ii）观众的程度。贬低被羞辱的个人——羞耻感所抵御的威胁。这些反应在美国和印度内部以及之间都是一致的。此外，涉及低水平唤醒变量的替代解释似乎无法解释这些结果，这表明连贯性是由羞耻系统赋予的。这些发现表明，连贯性可以在多个层面上观察到，并提高了情绪程序协调反应的可能性，即使在连贯性较低的情况下也是如此。