Open Mind: The Science of Embarrassment
by Paul Broks, Times Online
August 17, 2009
Open mind: the science of embarrassment; When we feel pride we are on the inside looking out, but with shame we're on the outside looking at our red-faced selves
I decided on my second day at infant school that it wasn’t for me, so I made a dash for freedom during the morning milk break. I got as far as the end of the street. The next day at assembly the headmistress, the sour-faced Miss Rawlings, yanked me out in front of the school for a dressing down. Decades later the gut-gripping fear and humiliation still resonate. I see myself, head bowed and eyes welling, but there’s a purse-lipped defiance that, even now, gives me a glimmer of pride. Strangely, I see myself from the outside, or at least I do when I focus on the humiliation, almost as if I’m watching someone else. But when I remember the defiance, I experience it from the inside. The same is true for other low and high points of self-consciousness. When I think of the glowing pride I felt on holding my baby son for the first time, I’m on the inside looking out. But when I recall the excruciating shame of being caught ... (doing what, I’m not going to divulge here but feel free to imagine the worst), I’m definitely on the outside looking in on my red-faced self.
Charles Darwin paved the way for modern scientific studies of emotion. He understood that emotions evolved to solve survival-related behavioural problems. They gear us up for fight or flight in the face of physical threat (anger and fear), to affiliate with our fellows (joy), to recoil from contamination (disgust), to mate and reproduce (love/lust), and to come to terms with loss (sadness and grief). He understood, too, that facial expression and posture are a universal language to communicate emotion. But Darwin never figured out what problem embarrassment solved or what adaptive function its physical expression, the blush, might have. Recent work by Dacher Keltner at the University of California, Berkeley, sheds light on the enigma. Displays of embarrassment (blushing, bowing of the head, gaze aversion) have an appeasement function. Their effect is to help to reconcile social relations when a convention has been violated — breaking wind in public, for example, or making an ill-judged remark. In evolutionary terms, this is problem-solving behaviour because social rules are the basis of co-operative alliances. Embarrassment is an efficient way of signalling, “OK, I know that’s not the right way to behave, there’s no need to ostracise me”. According to Keltner, embarrassment displays kindle feelings of forgiveness and liking in the observer. So it’s no surprise that embarrassment-like behaviours also feature in flirtation — the coy glances, the smiles, face touching and the involuntary blush.
A better understanding of embarrassment, in particular of the way self-visualisation stokes up anxiety, is also opening clinical insights into the treatment of anxiety disorders, in particular social phobia — the pathological fear of social humiliation. Emily Holmes, in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford, is at the forefront. The kind of “third-person” self-imagery I experience when conjuring memories of my humiliated schoolboy self turns out to be central to the experience of social phobia. Sufferers describe images such as “seeing one’s face from the outside, as red as a tomato, with beads of sweat pouring down”. It’s only now that we are fully appreciating how powerful such images are in maintaining the disorder, and consequently the value, of targeting them with psychological treatments. Rest in peace, Miss Rawlings — perhaps you are making a posthumous contribution to science.
Paul Broks is senior lecturer in psychology (clinical) at the University of Plymouth.
by Paul Broks, Times Online
August 17, 2009
Open mind: the science of embarrassment; When we feel pride we are on the inside looking out, but with shame we're on the outside looking at our red-faced selves
I decided on my second day at infant school that it wasn’t for me, so I made a dash for freedom during the morning milk break. I got as far as the end of the street. The next day at assembly the headmistress, the sour-faced Miss Rawlings, yanked me out in front of the school for a dressing down. Decades later the gut-gripping fear and humiliation still resonate. I see myself, head bowed and eyes welling, but there’s a purse-lipped defiance that, even now, gives me a glimmer of pride. Strangely, I see myself from the outside, or at least I do when I focus on the humiliation, almost as if I’m watching someone else. But when I remember the defiance, I experience it from the inside. The same is true for other low and high points of self-consciousness. When I think of the glowing pride I felt on holding my baby son for the first time, I’m on the inside looking out. But when I recall the excruciating shame of being caught ... (doing what, I’m not going to divulge here but feel free to imagine the worst), I’m definitely on the outside looking in on my red-faced self.
Charles Darwin paved the way for modern scientific studies of emotion. He understood that emotions evolved to solve survival-related behavioural problems. They gear us up for fight or flight in the face of physical threat (anger and fear), to affiliate with our fellows (joy), to recoil from contamination (disgust), to mate and reproduce (love/lust), and to come to terms with loss (sadness and grief). He understood, too, that facial expression and posture are a universal language to communicate emotion. But Darwin never figured out what problem embarrassment solved or what adaptive function its physical expression, the blush, might have. Recent work by Dacher Keltner at the University of California, Berkeley, sheds light on the enigma. Displays of embarrassment (blushing, bowing of the head, gaze aversion) have an appeasement function. Their effect is to help to reconcile social relations when a convention has been violated — breaking wind in public, for example, or making an ill-judged remark. In evolutionary terms, this is problem-solving behaviour because social rules are the basis of co-operative alliances. Embarrassment is an efficient way of signalling, “OK, I know that’s not the right way to behave, there’s no need to ostracise me”. According to Keltner, embarrassment displays kindle feelings of forgiveness and liking in the observer. So it’s no surprise that embarrassment-like behaviours also feature in flirtation — the coy glances, the smiles, face touching and the involuntary blush.
A better understanding of embarrassment, in particular of the way self-visualisation stokes up anxiety, is also opening clinical insights into the treatment of anxiety disorders, in particular social phobia — the pathological fear of social humiliation. Emily Holmes, in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford, is at the forefront. The kind of “third-person” self-imagery I experience when conjuring memories of my humiliated schoolboy self turns out to be central to the experience of social phobia. Sufferers describe images such as “seeing one’s face from the outside, as red as a tomato, with beads of sweat pouring down”. It’s only now that we are fully appreciating how powerful such images are in maintaining the disorder, and consequently the value, of targeting them with psychological treatments. Rest in peace, Miss Rawlings — perhaps you are making a posthumous contribution to science.
Paul Broks is senior lecturer in psychology (clinical) at the University of Plymouth.
