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Description: Shame and guilt regulate basic human processes such as social cognition and relations. Both emotions are also involved in the aetiology and maintenance of mental disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression. However, concise scales that adequately capture these constructs are currently lacking, impeding research efforts to understand them more thoroughly. To this end, we developed the eight-item Guilt and Shame Questionnaire (GSQ-8); a brief measure of guilt and shame in English, German, and Dutch. We examined the reliability and validity of the GSQ-8 in a clinical sample of adults seeking treatment for childhood-trauma-related posttraumatic stress disorder (n = 209), a sample of adults who had suffered at least one traumatic life event reporting different levels of PTSD symptoms (n = 556), and a non-clinical sample of adults (n = 156). Theory-driven confirmatory factor analyses confirmed two correlated latent factors guilt and shame with four items for each factor. Across all samples, two-factor models yielded better model fit than one-factor solutions. Measurement invariance across gender, language, and the three samples was mostly established. Guilt and shame composite scores were associated with PTSD symptoms, depressive symptoms, life satisfaction, mental health-related quality of life, and self-blame, thus supporting scale validity. Importantly, both subscales predicted PTSD symptoms, depression, life satisfaction, and mental health-related quality of life over and above self-blame, bolstering support for their incremental validity. The GSQ-8 is a parsimonious, reliable, and valid tool to assess shame and guilt in clinical, sub-clinical, and non-clinical populations, allowing applications across a broad range of research questions.