Embarrassment's effect on facial processing

Abstract

Embarrassment's effect on interpersonal perception, specifically facial processing, was explored. Previous work on social anxiety, which some suggest is similar to embarrassment, finds that socially-anxious individuals tend to avoid negative feedback, such as angry eyes. The current work examined whether embarrassment leads to a similar bias or alternatively whether embarrassed individuals are motivated to look for social feedback in order to reconcile with their audience. Eye movements were recorded while participants looked at four different emotional expressions. Embarrassed participants' fixated proportionally more on the eyes than controls and also fixated proportionally less on other less emotionally informative areas of the face compared to controls. Embarrassment appears to have different effects on facial information processing than social anxiety. The authors suggest this is due to asymmetries in motivational states elicited in social anxiety and embarrassment.

Keywords:

• Embarrassment
• Eye movement
• Facial perception
• Social anxiety

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Keith Rayner and Elizabeth Schotter for helpful suggestions.

Notes

¹Given the findings for regret and nervousness noted previously, we performed additional correlations on these measures. Regret was significantly correlated with IAS in the embarrassment condition and with BFNE in both conditions, r(25)=.417, p<.05; r(25)=.535, p<.01; r(28)=.401, p<.05, respectively. IAS significantly correlated with nervousness in the sample as a whole, r(54)=.296, but did not reach significance when examined separately for the two conditions, p>.175.