Embarrassment

Abstract

Embarrassment, which MeSH classifies under shame, is the brief, flustered self-conscious emotion that follows a public predicament in which one's conduct or image has been called into question. This article covers the evidence that embarrassment is distinct from shame, guilt and amusement, its nonverbal display and the appeasement account of it, the remedial value of blushing, the trait of embarrassability, vicarious embarrassment and the mentalising and social-pain networks that carry it, and its emergence with self-recognition. The central dispute is whether embarrassment is caused by a loss of self-esteem, by concern for others' evaluations, or by the breakdown of an interaction script. Three interactive demos show how a display and restitution shape evaluation after a mishap, how a blush repairs trust, and how trait empathy and closeness, but not the protagonist's awareness or intention, shape embarrassment felt on another's behalf.

Keywords: embarrassment, blushing, self-conscious emotions, vicarious embarrassment

Embarrassment is, of the three negatively valenced self-conscious emotions, the one most clearly tied to an audience. The modern literature on it began with two questions: whether it is a distinct emotion at all, and what theoretical account best explains it. On the first, the evidence indicates that the antecedents, experience and display of embarrassment, and to a limited extent its autonomic physiology, are distinct from shame, guilt and amusement and share the dynamic, temporal characteristics of emotion (Keltner & Buswell, 1997). On the second, five accounts have been proposed: three focus on the causes of embarrassment, positing that it follows the loss of self-esteem, concern for others' evaluations, or the absence of scripts to guide interactions; a fourth focuses on the effects of its remedial actions, which correct preceding transgressions; and a fifth on the functional parallels between embarrassment and nonhuman appeasement (Keltner & Buswell, 1997). What follows takes those accounts as its map.

What Embarrassment Is

Embarrassment is defined by its occasions. To create a comprehensive catalogue of embarrassing predicaments, descriptions of recent embarrassments were obtained from 350 high school and college students; four major dimensions of embarrassing circumstances emerged, involving individual, interactive, audience and bystander behaviour, and the 12 subcategories of social predicaments delineated appeared to fit a social esteem model of embarrassment more parsimoniously than an awkward interaction model (Miller, 1992). In the same study, respondents' embarrassability predicted the intensity of their embarrassments, high school students suffered stronger embarrassments than college students, and women reported stronger embarrassments than men (Miller, 1992). The catalogue shows one thing directly: embarrassment is produced not only by one's own pratfalls but by the conduct of interaction partners, audiences and bystanders.

Whether embarrassment is an emotion in its own right was the first question the field had to answer. The review that posed it concluded that the antecedents, experience and display of embarrassment, and to a limited extent its autonomic physiology, are distinct from shame, guilt and amusement and share the dynamic, temporal characteristics of emotion, and then set out the five theoretical accounts, three about causes, one about the effects of remedial action and one about the functional parallels with nonhuman appeasement (Keltner & Buswell, 1997). The accounts are not exclusive. The social-esteem and social-evaluation accounts are versions of the second cause, the awkward-interaction account is the third, and the appeasement account is a claim about function that is compatible with any of the three causes.

Figure 1

Five Accounts of Embarrassment

Embarrassment, Shame and Guilt

The Medical Subject Headings thesaurus files embarrassment beneath shame, which it in turn files beneath guilt; the placement is an indexing convenience, and the psychological evidence treats the three as distinct. When 182 undergraduates described personal embarrassment, shame and guilt experiences and rated them on structural and phenomenological dimensions, the ratings clearly demonstrated that shame, guilt and embarrassment are not merely different terms for the same affective experience; embarrassment was a relatively distant neighbour of shame and guilt, and the differences among the three could not be explained simply by intensity of affect or by degree of moral transgression (Tangney et al., 1996). All three emotions typically occurred in social contexts, but a significant proportion of shame and guilt events occurred when respondents were alone (Tangney et al., 1996). Embarrassment is the one of the three for which an audience, real or imagined, is closest to a defining condition.

The brain draws a similar line. When 19 healthy volunteers read sentences carrying neutral, guilty or embarrassing content during scanning, both guilt and embarrassment conditions commonly activated the medial prefrontal cortex, left posterior superior temporal sulcus and visual cortex, while compared with guilt the embarrassment condition produced greater activation in the right anterior temporal cortex, bilateral hippocampus and visual cortex; most of these regions have been implicated in the neural substrate of social cognition or theory of mind, and the authors took their data as favouring the notion that the evaluative process of embarrassment might be more complex than that of guilt (Takahashi et al., 2004). A systematic review of 21 functional and structural imaging studies found that embarrassment was more likely to be associated with activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and amygdala, shame with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex and sensorimotor cortex, and guilt with the ventral anterior cingulate cortex, posterior temporal regions and the precuneus, while cautioning that studies differed considerably in methodology and that further research is required to replicate the findings (Bastin et al., 2016).

The Embarrassment Display and Its Functions

Embarrassment has a face. According to appeasement hypotheses, embarrassment should have a distinct nonverbal display that is more readily perceived when displayed by individuals from lower status groups, and evidence from five studies supported both claims: the nonverbal behaviour of embarrassment was distinct from a related emotion, amusement, resembled the temporal pattern of facial expressions of emotion, was uniquely related to self-reports of embarrassment, and was accurately identified by observers who judged the spontaneous displays of various emotions (Keltner, 1995). Across the judgement studies, observers were more accurate and attributed more emotion to the embarrassment displays of female and African American targets than to those of male and Caucasian targets (Keltner, 1995). The display was later posed for a standardised stimulus set: a Facial Action Coding System-verified set of expressions was developed that is the first such set to include the three self-conscious emotions known to have recognisable expressions, embarrassment, pride and shame, alongside the six established basic emotions (Tracy et al., 2009).

The display does social work. In an early experiment, embarrassment display and restitution behaviour were manipulated orthogonally in a videotaped incident in which an actor upset a sales display in a store; it was reasoned that both appearing embarrassed and engaging in restitution would have positive but distinct effects on social evaluation, and that the beneficial effect of restitution would be mitigated by embarrassment display, and the results were consistent with these expectations (Semin & Manstead, 1982). Three decades on, the account was extended from apology to signal: although individuals experience embarrassment as an unpleasant, negative emotion, its expression signals the embarrassed individual's prosociality and fosters trust (Feinberg et al., 2012). In five studies, individuals who were more embarrassable also reported greater prosociality and behaved more generously than their less embarrassable counterparts, observers rated embarrassed targets as more prosocial and less antisocial than targets who displayed a different emotion or none, and observers were more willing to give resources to and to affiliate with these targets, effects mediated by perceptions of the targets as prosocial (Feinberg et al., 2012).

Blushing

Blushing is a physiological response closely tied to embarrassment, and it raises puzzles of its own. A review of the physiology, situational and dispositional antecedents, behavioural concomitants and interpersonal consequences of social blushing offered a model in which people blush when they experience undesired social attention, and took up the puzzles of blushing in solitude, the phenomenology of blushing, types of blushing and blushing in dark-skinned people (Leary et al., 1992). The blush turns out to be useful to the blusher. After reading a vignette describing either a transgression or a mishap, participants saw pictures of people with or without a blush and rated them on dimensions such as sympathy and trustworthiness; in most instances, blushing actors were evaluated more favourably than their non-blushing counterparts, so that although people often consider blushing an undesirable response, in the context of transgressions and mishaps it is a helpful bodily signal with face-saving properties (Dijk et al., 2009).

The remedial effect survives a real betrayal. In a computerised prisoner's dilemma game, 196 participants faced a virtual opponent who defected in the second round and then appeared in a photograph with a blushing or a non-blushing face; in a subsequent trust task the blushing opponent was entrusted with more money than the non-blushing opponent, and participants also indicated that they trusted the blushing opponent more, expected a lower probability that she would defect again, and judged her more positively (Dijk et al., 2011). Blushing also appears early and is not only a marker of anxiety. When 102 four-and-a-half-year-olds sang in front of an audience and watched the performance back in its presence, physiological blushing was measured together with positive and negative expressions of shyness; a higher blushing response was related to greater social anxiety in children who displayed few positive shy expressions but not in those who displayed many, children who expressed many negative shy expressions were highly socially anxious regardless of blushing, and the authors conclude that blushing combined with positive shy behaviours appears to be an adaptive social mechanism that may protect from heightened social anxiety (Nikolić et al., 2016). A longitudinal follow-up tested whether this self-conscious emotional reactivity contributes to the development of social anxiety disorder symptoms: in 115 children seen at ages 2.5, 4.5 and 7.5 years, blushing measured as a temperature increase at 4.5 years predicted social anxiety disorder symptoms at 7.5 years over and above social behavioural inhibition and early social anxiety, which the authors read as evidence of two pathways to childhood social anxiety disorder, one through early high behavioural inhibition and one through heightened self-conscious emotional reactivity (Nikolić et al., 2020).

Embarrassability

People differ in how readily they are embarrassed, and the trait has been used to test the rival accounts. Competing theoretical models suggest either that embarrassable people should be especially concerned about others' evaluations of them or that they should lack social skills; when 310 participants provided extensive self-reports of social skill, fear of negative evaluation, self-esteem, self-consciousness and negative affectivity, regression and factor analyses indicated that highly embarrassable people are particularly concerned with the normative appropriateness of behaviour and are more motivated to avoid rejection from others, whereas shyness was best predicted by low social self-confidence and low social skill (Miller, 1995). The data best support a social-evaluation model of embarrassment and argue that embarrassability is linked to the appropriateness of social behaviour and shyness to its effectiveness (Miller, 1995). The trait has its own instrument: a 25-item Susceptibility to Embarrassment Scale was designed to describe the personality characteristics of easily embarrassed persons rather than reactions to potentially embarrassing situations, proved internally consistent and temporally stable with items uncontaminated by social desirability, and was located within the Big Five structure of normal adult personality (Kelly & Jones, 1997).

Vicarious Embarrassment and the Brain

Imaging of embarrassment began with norm violations. Using event-related fMRI to compare neural responses to stories describing normal behaviour, embarrassing situations or violations of social norms, one study found that processing transgressions of social norms involved systems previously reported to play a role in representing the mental states of others, namely medial prefrontal and temporal regions, together with systems previously found to respond to aversive emotional expressions, namely lateral orbitofrontal cortex and medial prefrontal cortex; the responses were similar for intentional and unintentional violations, although more pronounced for the intentional ones (Berthoz et al., 2002). Genuine embarrassment was later induced in the scanner. In a mock-up scenario with three confederates, the presence of an audience affected physiological and neural responses to failures and achievements: publicity induced activations in mentalising areas and failures led to activations in arousal processing systems, mentalising activity and attention toward the audience were increased in socially anxious participants, and the converging integration of information from mentalising areas and arousal processing systems within the ventral anterior insula and amygdala was proposed as the neural pathway of embarrassment (Müller-Pinzler et al., 2015).

People also feel embarrassed for others. In two studies of vicarious embarrassment across a broad range of situations, it was experienced regardless of whether the observed protagonist acted accidentally or intentionally and was aware or unaware of being in an embarrassing situation; the anterior cingulate cortex and left anterior insula, two cortical structures typically involved in vicarious feelings of others' pain, were strongly implicated in experiencing the social pain of others' flaws and pratfalls, and activity in both correlated positively with individual differences in trait empathy (Krach et al., 2011). A later study distinguished embarrassment for another person's mishap from embarrassment shared with that person: embarrassment on behalf of others engaged the temporal pole and medial prefrontal cortex, central structures of the mentalising network, together with the anterior insula and anterior cingulate, whereas sharing others' embarrassment additionally stimulated the posterior superior temporal sulcus, which showed increased functional integration with inferior parietal and insular areas (Paulus et al., 2015).

Closeness and motive shape the response. Witnessing threats to a friend's or a stranger's social integrity produced consistent responses of the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex, shared circuits of the aversive quality of affect, and of the medial prefrontal cortex and temporal pole of the mentalising network, but the anterior cingulate and insula activation was increased during vicarious embarrassment for a friend's failures, and the precuneus, a region associated with self-related thought, showed specific activation and increased functional connectivity with the shared circuits while observing friends (Müller-Pinzler et al., 2016). When 34 participants observed social-integrity threats to an unfortunate other and reported either their schadenfreude or their fremdscham, the empathically shared embarrassment, the left anterior insula was activated less when observers focused on schadenfreude, nucleus accumbens activity covaried exclusively with the intensity of schadenfreude, and the authors conclude that the valence and intensity of interpersonal emotions depend strongly on the experimental context and that empathy and reward circuits shape the subjective experience (Paulus et al., 2018). The common thread across this literature is that the mentalising network represents others' states while the anterior insula and anterior cingulate network processes one's own bodily arousal during interpersonal emotions such as embarrassment, shame, guilt or pride (Müller-Pinzler et al., 2017).

Table 1. Human imaging findings on embarrassment, as reported in the cited abstracts.

Note. Each row lists only the regions named in that paper's abstract for the embarrassment or norm-violation condition or contrast (Berthoz et al., 2002; Takahashi et al., 2004; Krach et al., 2011; Paulus et al., 2015; Müller-Pinzler et al., 2015; Bastin et al., 2016). Paradigms and contrasts differ, so the rows are not directly comparable.

Development

Embarrassment requires a self to be exposed, and it appears when the self does. In two studies the mirror-rouge technique was used to differentiate children into those who showed self-recognition and those who did not; in the first, 27 children aged 9 to 24 months were observed in two experimental situations thought to differentially elicit fear and embarrassment behaviours, and in the second, 44 children aged 22 months were seen in those situations and three additional contexts thought to elicit embarrassment (Lewis et al., 1989). The results of both studies indicated that embarrassment but not wariness was related to self-recognition (Lewis et al., 1989). The finding anchors the self-conscious emotions to self-development: a child who does not yet recognise the self in a mirror can show wariness but not yet embarrassment. By four and a half, the blush and its shy accompaniments are measurable before an audience (Nikolić et al., 2016).

Worked Example

The embarrassment literature's samples repay a little arithmetic. The two blush-remedy vignette experiments had 66 and 62 participants (Dijk et al., 2009), a total of 128, and the prisoner's dilemma study had 196 (Dijk et al., 2011), so the three blush experiments together rest on 324 participants, with the trust study alone contributing 60.5% of them. The two early-development studies observed 27 and 44 children (Lewis et al., 1989), 71 in all; the embarrassability survey had 310 respondents (Miller, 1995) and the predicament catalogue 350 (Miller, 1992), so the two self-report studies of embarrassability together drew on 660 respondents, more than nine times the developmental total. The age window in the first development study, 9 to 24 months, spans 15 months, and the second study's single age of 22 months falls in its upper fifth.

The imaging samples are small by comparison. The sentence-reading study scanned 19 volunteers (Takahashi et al., 2004) and the schadenfreude study 34 (Paulus et al., 2018); the systematic review pooled 21 studies (Bastin et al., 2016). A between-subject design with 34 participants split into two reporting conditions leaves about 17 per condition. The blush study in four-and-a-half-year-olds measured 102 children (Nikolić et al., 2016), three times the schadenfreude sample, and still treats its interaction between blushing and positive shy expressions as suggestive.

Discussion

Three lessons follow for cognitive psychology. First, the question of whether embarrassment is a distinct emotion has been answered in the same way at three levels. Phenomenological ratings placed it as a relatively distant neighbour of shame and guilt (Tangney et al., 1996); its nonverbal behaviour was distinct from amusement and uniquely related to self-reports of embarrassment (Keltner, 1995); and the review that asked the question concluded that its antecedents, experience and display, and to a limited extent its physiology, are distinct from shame, guilt and amusement (Keltner & Buswell, 1997). The thesaurus that files it beneath shame is recording how the literature is indexed, not what it found. The distinction has nonetheless been drawn more than one way. On a rival view tested in three scenario studies, people reported experiencing shame if a real flaw was exposed but embarrassment if an audience member would reasonably think such a flaw was exposed, and anger when the audience's perception of a flaw was unreasonable; the data were consistent with the view that people refer to themselves as embarrassed when they believe others have reason to think a flaw has been revealed, and inconsistent with the view that embarrassment is tied to violations of conventions whereas shame is tied to moral failings (Sabini et al., 2001).

Second, the three causal accounts have been tested against one another and the record is divided. The catalogue of predicaments fit a social esteem model more parsimoniously than an awkward interaction model (Miller, 1992), embarrassable people were concerned with the normative appropriateness of behaviour and motivated to avoid rejection rather than lacking in skill (Miller, 1995), and embarrassment was induced in the scanner by the presence of an audience, with publicity driving mentalising activity (Müller-Pinzler et al., 2015). The interaction account, which descends from the sociological analysis of embarrassment and social organisation (Goffman, 1956), has its own direct test: when esteem-threatening feedback was delivered to 90 subjects under the guise of a pleasant but transparent pretext, a situation in which the interaction and self-esteem theories make contrasting predictions, reported feelings of embarrassment and of self-esteem were most consistent with the interaction theory (Parrott et al., 1988). Which account wins depends on which predicament is staged. The appeasement and remedial accounts, which concern function rather than cause, are supported in parallel: a display and restitution each improved evaluation (Semin & Manstead, 1982), a blush restored favourable evaluation after a transgression and trust after a defection (Dijk et al., 2009; Dijk et al., 2011), and the expression was read as a signal of prosociality (Feinberg et al., 2012).

Third, vicarious embarrassment has made the emotion a model case for social neuroscience. Embarrassment for another's pratfall engaged the anterior cingulate and anterior insula implicated in others' pain and scaled with trait empathy (Krach et al., 2011); sharing another's embarrassment added the posterior superior temporal sulcus (Paulus et al., 2015); a friend's failure increased the anterior cingulate and insula response more than a stranger's (Müller-Pinzler et al., 2016); and the same predicament could be read as fremdscham or as schadenfreude depending on what the observer was asked to report (Paulus et al., 2018).

Current Directions

The research front is neuroscientific and clinical. Socially interactive and immersive scanning scenarios have been developed for the real-life investigation of interpersonal emotions, and current research aims to explore how people make sense of others' emotional states during social interactions and to identify the factors that modulate those experiences, with implications for neuropsychiatric disorders that affect social behaviour such as social anxiety disorders or autism (Müller-Pinzler et al., 2017). The induction of genuine embarrassment before an audience has yielded neural markers in the ventral anterior insula and amygdala that are proposed as targets for developing treatment strategies for social anxiety disorders (Müller-Pinzler et al., 2015), and the finding that blushing is an early indicator of social anxiety only in children who cannot cope with fearful social situations, while blushing with positive shy behaviour may protect against it (Nikolić et al., 2016), has moved the developmental question from whether children blush to what the blush accompanies, and a longitudinal test has since found that blushing, indexed as a temperature increase, at 4.5 years uniquely predicted social anxiety disorder symptoms at 7.5 years (Nikolić et al., 2020). On the signalling side, the demonstration that observers respond to embarrassment with trust and affiliation (Feinberg et al., 2012) and that a blush restores trust after a defection (Dijk et al., 2011) connects the emotion to the economics of cooperation. The review that asked whether embarrassment is a distinct emotion closed on its unanswered questions (Keltner & Buswell, 1997).

Common Misconceptions

“Embarrassment is just mild shame.”

Phenomenological ratings showed that embarrassment was a relatively distant neighbour of shame and guilt and that the differences could not be explained simply by intensity of affect or degree of moral transgression (Tangney et al., 1996); its antecedents, experience and display are distinct from shame, guilt and amusement (Keltner & Buswell, 1997). Where the line falls is still argued: on one rival account the difference is whether a real flaw has been revealed or an audience merely has reason to think so (Sabini et al., 2001).

“Blushing only makes a bad situation worse.”

Although people often consider blushing an undesirable response, blushing actors were evaluated more favourably than non-blushing ones after a transgression or mishap (Dijk et al., 2009), and a blushing opponent who had defected was entrusted with more money than a non-blushing one (Dijk et al., 2011).

“Easily embarrassed people lack social skills.”

Highly embarrassable people were particularly concerned with the normative appropriateness of behaviour and motivated to avoid rejection, whereas low social skill and low social self-confidence predicted shyness, not embarrassability (Miller, 1995).

“People are only embarrassed by their own mistakes.”

The catalogue of embarrassing circumstances included dimensions of interactive, audience and bystander behaviour as well as individual behaviour (Miller, 1992), and vicarious embarrassment was experienced for others' pratfalls regardless of whether the protagonist acted accidentally or intentionally or was aware of the predicament (Krach et al., 2011).

Glossary

Anterior cingulate cortex.

A medial frontal region that, with the anterior insula, is implicated in vicarious feelings of others' pain and in vicarious embarrassment, scaling with trait empathy and social closeness.

Anterior insula.

A region processing one's own bodily arousal during interpersonal emotions; its ventral part, with the amygdala, forms the proposed neural pathway of embarrassment before an audience.

Appeasement account.

The proposal that the embarrassment display functions like nonhuman appeasement, placating others after a transgression; it predicts a distinct display more readily perceived from lower-status individuals.

Awkward-interaction model.

The account, descended from the sociology of social organisation, on which embarrassment follows the breakdown of an interaction; fit the catalogue of predicaments less parsimoniously than the social esteem model but was favoured in a direct test against the self-esteem theory.

Blushing.

The reddening of the face under undesired social attention; a bodily signal with face-saving properties after transgressions and mishaps.

Embarrassability.

Chronic susceptibility to embarrassment; linked to concern with the appropriateness of behaviour and the wish to avoid rejection, and predictive of greater prosociality.

Embarrassment display.

The distinct nonverbal behaviour of embarrassment, accurately identified by observers and distinct from amusement, with the temporal pattern of a facial expression of emotion.

Fremdscham.

Empathically sharing the embarrassment about another person's misfortune; the German term used in the social-neuroscience literature for vicarious embarrassment.

Mentalising network.

Medial prefrontal cortex, temporal pole and related regions engaged when representing others' states of mind; associated with interpersonal emotions including embarrassment.

Mirror-rouge technique.

A test of self-recognition in which a mark is placed on the child's face before a mirror; embarrassment, but not wariness, was related to passing it.

Posterior superior temporal sulcus.

A temporal region additionally recruited when embarrassment is shared with, rather than felt for, another person.

Remedial-action account.

The account that explains embarrassment by the effects of the remedial actions it motivates, which correct preceding transgressions.

Schadenfreude.

Pleasure derived from another's misfortune; tracked by nucleus accumbens activity and contrasted with fremdscham for the same predicament.

Self-conscious emotions.

Emotions such as embarrassment, shame, guilt and pride that require a representation of the self; embarrassment emerges with self-recognition.

Shame.

The self-conscious emotion of a negatively evaluated self; MeSH's parent descriptor for embarrassment, from which the evidence distinguishes it.

Social esteem model.

The account on which embarrassment follows concern for others' evaluations of the self; supported by the catalogue of predicaments and the embarrassability data.

Susceptibility to Embarrassment Scale.

A 25-item measure of the personality characteristics of easily embarrassed persons, located within the Big Five structure.

Vicarious embarrassment.

Embarrassment experienced when observing others' public pratfalls or etiquette violations, whether or not the protagonist is aware of the predicament.

Key Researchers

Corine Dijk

. Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Amsterdam; showed that blushing after a transgression or mishap has remedial value and that a blusher who defects is trusted more than one who does not. Faculty Page

Dacher Keltner

. Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley; identified the distinct nonverbal display of embarrassment and proposed its appeasement function, and later showed that embarrassment signals prosociality. ORCID - Wikipedia - Google Scholar

Sören Krach

. Professor at the University of Lübeck and co-leader of its Social Neuroscience Lab; established vicarious embarrassment as a research topic, linking it to empathy and to the neural circuits of social pain and mentalising. ORCID - Faculty Page - Google Scholar

Mark R. Leary

. Garonzik Family Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University; co-authored the standard review of social blushing and placed embarrassment within the social-evaluative account of self-presentational concern. Wikipedia - Faculty Page

Michael Lewis

. University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, where he directed the Institute for the Study of Child Development; developmental theorist of the self-conscious emotions who showed that embarrassment emerges with self-recognition in the second year of life. Wikipedia - Faculty Page

Rowland S. Miller

. Distinguished Regents Professor of Psychology, retired, at Sam Houston State University; characterised the circumstances that embarrass people and the trait of embarrassability, showing that it rests on concern for social evaluation rather than on poor social skill. Faculty Page

Frieder M. Paulus

. Professor at the University of Lübeck and co-leader of its Social Neuroscience Lab; identified the role of the posterior superior temporal sulcus in sharing others' embarrassment and separated empathy-based vicarious embarrassment from reward-based schadenfreude. Faculty Page

Jessica L. Tracy

. Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia and director of the Emotion and Self Lab; co-developed the first FACS-verified set of emotion expressions to include embarrassment, pride and shame. Faculty Page

Frequently Asked Questions

What is embarrassment in psychology?

Embarrassment is a self-conscious emotion whose antecedents, experience and display, and to a limited extent its autonomic physiology, are distinct from shame, guilt and amusement; its causes have been explained by loss of self-esteem, concern for others' evaluations, or the absence of scripts to guide interaction (Keltner & Buswell, 1997).

How is embarrassment different from shame?

In phenomenological ratings embarrassment was a relatively distant neighbour of shame and guilt, and the differences among the three could not be explained simply by intensity of affect or degree of moral transgression (Tangney et al., 1996); in imaging it is more often associated with the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and amygdala, shame with dorsolateral prefrontal and posterior cingulate regions (Bastin et al., 2016).

Does embarrassment have a recognisable expression?

Yes. The nonverbal behaviour of embarrassment was distinct from amusement, resembled the temporal pattern of facial expressions of emotion, was uniquely related to self-reports of embarrassment and was accurately identified by observers (Keltner, 1995); it is now part of a FACS-verified expression set (Tracy et al., 2009).

Why do people blush?

One model holds that people blush when they experience undesired social attention (Leary et al., 1992); whatever its cause, in the context of transgressions and mishaps blushing is a helpful bodily signal with face-saving properties (Dijk et al., 2009).

Is being embarrassed socially useful?

Observers recognise the expression of embarrassment as a signal of prosociality and commitment to social relationships and respond with greater trust and a desire to affiliate (Feinberg et al., 2012), and both appearing embarrassed and making restitution improved evaluation after a mishap (Semin & Manstead, 1982).

What makes some people more easily embarrassed?

Highly embarrassable people are particularly concerned with the normative appropriateness of behaviour and more motivated to avoid rejection, whereas shyness is predicted by low social self-confidence and low social skill (Miller, 1995); embarrassability also predicted the intensity of reported embarrassments (Miller, 1992).

Why do we feel embarrassed for other people?

Vicarious embarrassment arises regardless of whether the protagonist acted intentionally or knew of the predicament, engages the anterior cingulate cortex and left anterior insula implicated in others' pain, and correlates with trait empathy (Krach et al., 2011); the anterior cingulate and insula response to it is increased for a friend's failures (Müller-Pinzler et al., 2016).

When do children first show embarrassment?

Embarrassment but not wariness was related to self-recognition in children aged 9 to 24 months, so it appears once the child recognises the self in a mirror (Lewis et al., 1989).

References