504 
In his memoir Ultramarathon Man: Confes -
sions of an All-Night Runner, Dean Kar -
nazes (2005) explains how he first became 
an ultra-long-  distance runner, regularly 
racing 50–100 miles at a clip. Early in his 
adulthood, Karnazes was an accomplished 
businessman, using a hard-  earned MBA 
to rise in the ranks of a corporate job. He 
was successful but dissatisfied. Then, on his 
30th birthday, Karnazes had an epiphany. 
He  realized that the life he had been living 
was not one that allowed him to feel good 
about his authentic sense of self. To create an 
identity in which he could feel genuine pride, 
he needed to make a change. Beginning with 
a spontaneous 30-mile run out his door that 
night, Karnazes turned his life around, even -
tually building a career that now allows him 
to spend all day (and often all night) run -
ning.
What caused this massive behavioral 
shift? A trait-  oriented approach would sug -
gest that Karnazes possesses traits such as 
conscientiousness and openness, and these 
stable dispositional tendencies allowed him 
to make a major change in his life, then per -
sist in what had to be incredibly grueling 
path. Although such an account provides 
some understanding of Karnazes’s unusual 
life choices, his behaviors were also shaped by emotions—  and functionalist approaches 
to emotion suggest that distinct emotions 
provide the motivational underpinnings 
of most (if not all) human behaviors. But 
Karnazes’s decision to trade in a promising 
business career for a life of long-  distance 
running cannot be explained by “basic emo -
tions” such as fear, anger, or happiness. As 
a successful salesperson, happily married 
to the love of his life, Karnazes had surely 
attained the foundational goals that these 
emotions evolved to help humans achieve: 
survival and reproduction. Yet somehow 
this was not enough. In fact, to understand 
why anyone would choose  to subject himself 
to intense pain, frequent boredom, and the 
risk and uncertainty necessitated by a major 
postgraduate career change, we need to look 
beyond the basic emotions and fundamental 
evolutionary drives humans share with other 
animals, toward the more cognitively com -
plex, self-  relevant, social emotions and the 
uniquely human drive to build a meaning -
ful identity and sense of self. To understand 
Karnazes’s personality, we need to examine 
self- conscious emotions, such as pride and 
shame (Tracy, 2016).
We begin this chapter by explaining what 
we mean by social and self-  conscious emo -
tions, and why these emotions are particu -CHAPTER 23
The Self‑Conscious and  Social Emotions
A Personality and Social Functionalist Account
Jessica L. Tracy  
Aaron  C. Weidman