What Science Says About Embarrassment and Why you Feel That Way?

My friend is a baker and so she bakes cakes and other confectioneries so I hired her to bake a cake for my aunt's birthday. The birthday had friends, families, neighbors, and co-workers and so it was a good place for her to showcase her skill and business so she could get other people to patronize her. On the day of the event, she brought the cake but as she was bringing the cake in just in the presence of everyone, she slipped and fell to her face. The cake was completely destroyed and her dress was damaged because it hooked the door handle ripping her clothes off.

I was embarrassed but I am sure she was going to be more embarrassed than I was. Embarrassment is one feeling that we do not like and wish it disappears but then, it looks like being embarrassed is a good thing after all. Is this true, and how does science have anything to say about it?

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If we would judge the book by its cover, then we could say that embarrassment is an emotion but then, what are emotions? While science have been able to put a lot of things into defined state, emotion has been of those things that hasn't been properly defined since the 1800s. Scientific researchers have categorized emotions into basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger or fear) which are designed for our survival and happen unconsciously without the time to put them into thought since they happen to keep us alive, and self conscious emotion and this is where embarrassment fall into and this type of emotion require thinking before feeling. These type of emotions are determined by social rules in some cases because they define if we are embarrassed or not.

If you live in a place where you can walk outside naked without anyone questioning you or seeing it as bad, you wouldn't worry about not seeing your cloth and going to work naked but if you live in a community where putting on cloths is a standard social practice, then feeling embarrassed would not be a problem. Amongst my friends, we can fart without feeling embarrassed because we do not see it as wrong within ourselves but when we are in public farting out loud can be embarrassing because social rules tag it as not a good social practice. An embarrassing moment was one day when a lady spill her food in a restaurant and everyone stopped for a minute including myself before we continued eating our meal. There is a high chance the lady was embarrassed at the moment and it took the help of the staffs of the restaurants to make her feel better.

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The entire scenario I gave is based on Social evaluation as embarrassment comes from anticipating other people's bad judgement even when they do not bother themselves or paying attention like we think they are. The expected judgement we look forward to from others causes us the pain we feel when this embarrassing moments happen. When the side we do not want people to associate us with is being displayed in their presence, we become embarrassed.

According Psychologist John Sabini, Embarrassment can be triggered by things like Faux pas when a person commit a social gaffe and even being the central of attention can make a person embarrassed. For instance getting proposed to by your boyfriend at a restaurant only to hear everyone at the clamoring say yes. This means you are the central of attention and this can sincerely lead to a person being embarrassed.

There can also be cases where people are embarrassed because they do not know what to do but then what embarrasses Mr A doesn't Embarrassed B and people who do not feel embarrassed do not worry about social expectations. Although what embarrasses Mr A might not embarrass Mr B, there are cases where you feel embarrassed for other people like how I was for my friend and it is known as Vicarious embarrassment. With this type of feeling, you are imagining what other people are feeling. This fires particular regions of the brain that helps us feel empathy because we care for the person. This said, please share with me your thoughts on Embarrassment and your experience.

Reference

https://online.uwa.edu/news/emotional-psychology/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3600914/
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pcn.12182
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4769632/
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/understanding-the-stress-response
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/embarrassment-a-form-of-social-pain
https://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/mcgrawp/pdf/mcgraw.warren.2010.pdf
https://greymattersjournal.org/thats-cringe-the-neuroscience-behind-embarassment/
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_506-1