Embarrassment

NORDIK XII (2018), Copenhagen University, Denmark. Abstract: Emotions can be physical experiences. They may cause an unpleasant pressure on your shoulders, contract the skin over your collarbones, or make your arms or chest burn. They can fill your body with aggression, cause a pleasant warmth in your abdomen, or obstruct your breathing. This paper discusses emotions as physical and material phenomena—as matter— and the possibility to understand them as an artistic medium that, comparable to clay, plaster or paint, can determine the character of artworks.

To explore emotions as artistic medium, I shall consider art scenes as “emotional communities” structured by systems of feelings (Ahmed, 2004, Rosenwein, 2010, 2002). Such structures prescribe certain relations between a given aesthetic expression and its supposed emotional force in particular settings. One does not have to agree with a system of feelings, or even share its dominant emotions, but within an emotional community it will still bind certain aesthetic gestures to particular emotions. This, in turn, affects inclusions and exclusions, art historiography, and judgements of quality within the community.

In this paper, I will analyse three art performances by Anna Linder, Line Skywalker Karlström and Jenny Grönvall, which use the emotion of shame to problematize art scenes as emotional communities, from queer feminist perspectives.

A Book Review on Hong Kong's most recent short story anthology. 8 stories in English are collected, which provide a glimpse of the Special Administrative Region's current issues, preoccupations, and English writing landscape.

Marshall Moore and Xu Xi, ed. The Queen of Statue Square: New Short Fiction from Hong Kong.

Nottingham, UK: Critical, Cultural and Communications Press, 2014. 159 pages. ISBN 978-1-905510-43- 6.

... Thus, self-esteem plays a central role in distancing one from the anxiety arising from a death without meaning. ... They argued that increased anxiety and increased efforts to defend one'sself-esteem in response to threats to self-esteem supported their theory. ...

This position paper presents a conversation between players and the designers of the unique mobile game experience Cunt Touch This. Revisiting their personal experiences with playing the game, the player-authors read the game as a system that takes advantage of social embarrassment as a key element from which the pleasure of the game is derived. Contrasting this view, the designer-authors comment on the original intention, production context and purpose of Cunt Touch This. The goal of this confrontation is to explore embarrassment as a feeling oscillating between the emotional and the political dimensions of play. The unusual discussion format of the paper allows us to invite potentially challenging questions: When, where and why does embarrassment come about? What function does it have in play? Is it just part of the fun, or ideologically charged? Drawing together our differing perspectives as players and designers we contribute a candid reflection on the wider issues of embarrassment as it relates to design.

This article develops a new phenomenological analysis of the interpersonal motives and structure of shame. I pursue the argument that shame is rooted in our desire for social affirmation and conditioned by our ability to see ourselves as we appear to others. My central thesis is that shame is what we feel when, due to some trait or action of ours, we come to perceive ourselves as fundamentally despicable and non-affirmable. By showing how our urge for affirmation fuels and informs our self-perception in shame, the analysis provides a better understanding of the simultaneously interpersonal and personal character of shame. Furthermore, it sheds new light on some central aspects of shame that have been insufficiently understood: on the emotional charge and quality of shame, on the role played by our values and identity in shame, and on the continuity, differences, and transfers between personal shame, social shame, and embarrassment.

Embarrassment is often conceptualized as produced by either an awkward interaction or a negative social evaluation. The present study uses the Cupach and Metts (1994) and Sharkey and Stafford (1990) typologies to analyze these two influences. Respondents (n=327) describe embarrassing situations they experienced and explain why they were embarrassing. Chi-square results suggest a difference between awkward interaction and social evaluation as the primary influence on embarrassment in self-induced, actor-responsible situations and on other-induced, observer-responsible situations. Self-induced embarrassment predicaments are associated with a loss of personal script and an awkward interaction. Embarrassment caused by others shows a greater influence of perceived negative social evaluation. These results suggest that embarrassment is best conceptualized as a multidimensional phenomenon having multiple triggers and with multiple communication responses.

By means of the word ‘embarrassment’, we can describe most contemporary mass culture phenomena and behavior from all walks of life. This is a key-word for the hierarchy of people, phenomena and objects. Constantly changign meanning of ‘embarrassment’ reflects the state of contemporary pop culture, where nothing is permanent, finite, shocking, where relativity and the ease of judging others are becoming a principle. ‘Embarrassment’ as a universal category is the social-cultural phenomenon, occurring in three areas: moral, aesthetic and linguistic.

Regarding self-conscious emotions, studies have shown that different forms of perfectionism show different relationships with pride, shame, and embarrassment depending on success and failure. What is unknown is whether these relationships also show cultural variations. Therefore, we conducted a study investigating how self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism predicted pride and embarrassment after success and failure comparing 363 British and 352 Japanese students. Students were asked to respond to a set of scenarios where they imagined achieving either perfect (success) or flawed results (failure). In both British and Japanese students, self-oriented perfectionism positively predicted pride after success and embarrassment after failure whereas socially prescribed perfectionism predicted embarrassment after success and failure. Moreover, in Japanese students, socially prescribed perfectionism positively predicted pride after success and self-oriented perfectionism negatively predicted pride after failure. The findings have implications for our understanding of perfectionism indicating that the perfectionism–pride relationship not only varies between perfectionism dimensions, but may also show cultural variations.

This article takes as its starting point the divergent responses that J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy (The Childhood of Jesus [2013], The Schooldays of Jesus [2016] and The Death of Jesus [2019]) has drawn from reviewers and scholars respectively. Where reviewers have generally regarded these works’ difficulty as obstructive, scholars have taken their difficulty as both the justification and catalyst for sustained engagement. This divergence is explained, in part, as a consequence of the literacies developed by and in response to modernism – literacies which regarded difficulty as both the signature of the worthwhile artwork and as the criterion which justifies the special attention of specialized readers. If one aim of this article is to situate Coetzee and Coetzee studies within this tradition, a second aim is to ask whether the forms of attention garnered by his late trilogy are less an index of intrinsic challenges than of Coetzee’s reputation as a challenging writer. To do so is to worry the overready ascription of ‘Coetzeean’ difficulty – along with the modes of reading it tends to enlist – in order to reposition bewilderment, embarrassment and other ugly aesthetic-affects as generative for criticism.

One of the consequences of the widespread use and ubiquity of digital technologies is how a growing number and kind of exchanges and information are inscribed in and by these devices, as texts, images and sounds, contributing to the materialization of emotions and feelings. These affective inscriptions increase our reflexivity and the sharing of emotions, the attachment between people and devices, as well as the mediated attachment and attunement to other people. These inscriptions that increase the ability to read and keep track of affects and relationships contribute to the shaping of our affective cultures, as well as to contemporary modes of subjection. Contemporary transformations of the threshold of embarrassment regarding the disclosure of personal information and personal images online are an example of this digital contribution to our affective culture.

"Purpose/Objectives: Discrete emotions like embarrassment are among the most readily modifiable barriers to health-promoting examinations, such as screens for colorectal cancer. Prior studies are scattered, with mixed evidence of ethnic and gender differences, together with indications of a female, but not male, preference for same-gender physicians. This report examined CRC embarrassment among men and women from three ethnic groups and examined the associated physician gender preference by patient gender and ethnicity.
Design: Cross-sectional purposive sampling.
Setting: Community
Sample: A purpose-derived, convenience sample of 245 European American, African American, and immigrant Jamaican men and women (aged 45 – 75 years) living in Brooklyn, New York.
Methods: Participants provided demographics and a comprehensive measure of CRC screening embarrassment.
Main Research Variables: Participant gender and ethnicity, physician gender, and CRC screening embarrassment regarding feces/rectum and unwanted physical intimacy
Findings: As predicted, both males and females reported reduced faecal/rectal embarrassment and intimacy concern regarding same-gender physicians. As expected, Jamaicans versus European and African Americans reported greater embarrassment regarding feces/rectum although, in contrast to expectation, women reported less embarrassment than men; interactions indicated that rectal/faecal embarrassment was particularly high among Jamaican men.
Conclusions: Both men and women have a preference for same gender-physicians and embarrassment regarding feces and the rectum shows the most consistent ethnic and gender variation.
Implications for Nursing: Discussing embarrassment and its causes together with providing the opportunity to choose a same-gender physician may be promising strategies to reduce or manage embarrassment and increase CRC screening attendance."

“Thus, one of the things that anyone’s character or personality is is a record of the highly individual histories by which the fleeting emotion of shame has instituted far more durable, structural changes in one’s relational and interpretive strategies toward both self and others.”

—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Embarrassment has been defined as a social emotion that occurs due to the violation of a social norm in public, which is appraised by others (what we call " public embarrassment "). We propose that embarrassment can also be felt when one violates a social norm in private, or when one appraises oneself and violates one's self-concept (" private embarrassment "). We develop a typology of embarrassment with two underlying dimensions – social context (transgression in-public or in-private) and mechanism (appraisal by others or by the self). Of the four resulting categories, one fits with the dominant " social " view of embarrassment, whereas the other three have aspects of privacy. We generate triggers for public and private embarrassment and demonstrate their similarities in study 1. Study 2 (buying an incontinence drug) and study 3 (buying Viagra for impotence versus pleasure) replicate these similarities, and also exhibit differences in the experience of public and private embarrassment through accompanying physiological reactions, action tendencies, and behavioral consequences. Our aim is to expand the scope of embarrassment research to include private contexts and self-appraisal.

Drawing on discussions of neoliberalism, immaterial labour and exploitation of reality television participants, this article argues that the patients on the British reality show ‘Embarrassing Bodies’ are exploited because they receive no monetary return for their performances and are frequently shamed on camera. It then seeks to theorize exploited labour on reality television through Debord’s notion of the Spectacle. The author argues that in contemporary reality television the Spectacle is amplified through shame and affect. This is particularly evident in programmes that are about health and the body. The spectacular labour depicted in such programmes may serve to attract audiences for entertainment purposes, as well as to discipline them so that they remain healthy and productive workers.

This study examines the types of situations, or triggers, which cause embarrassment and their relationship with attachment and communication apprehension. Two embarrassment measures were compared: Modigliani’s (1968) embarrassability scale and Sabini, Siepmann, Stein, and Meyerowitz (2000) embarrassment questionnaire. Participants (N = 350) completed embarrassment and personality measures. Correlational and regression analyses were conducted. All embarrassment measures were related to communication apprehension and the anxious attachment dimension, but not the avoidant attachment dimension. Not surprisingly, all embarrassment measures were significantly positively correlated with one another. The Center of Attention embarrassment trigger significantly predicted communication apprehension above and beyond the other embarrassment measures in the regression model. In contrast, Faux Pas and Sticky Situations embarrassment triggers were independently associated with anxious attachment. The implications for the conceptualization and measurement of embarrassment are discussed.

Two thousand, one hundred and seven participants recounted situations in which they intentionally embarrassed another person (embarrassor accounts) or in which they perceived that they were intentionally embarrassed (target accounts). Specifically, this paper focused on differences in individuals' accounts of: (1) embarrassors' goals; (2) embarrassors' goal achievement; and (3) the degree of embarrassment felt by targets from embarrassors' and targets' perspectives. We asked 1136 participants to report a situation when they intentionally embarrassed another person. We asked another 971 participants to report a situation when they perceived that they were intentionally embarrassed by someone. Chi-square tests revealed strong effects for the perspective of the respondents on goals attempted and goals achieved. As expected, embarrassors were more likely than targets to report using embarrassment to negatively sanction another's behavior; targets were more likely than embarrassors to report that the embarrassors attempted the goal of self-satisfaction; embarrassors were more likely than targets to report that they were successful at achieving their goal; and embarrassors reported lower levels of target embarrassment than did targets. Implications and suggestions for future research are provided.

Job interview is a standardized situation that carries high stakes and involves impression management tactics. When an incident occurs in such a situation it could create embarrassment. Usually the expression of this self-conscious emotion positively affects others’ judgment. The aim of this study is to know whether this positive effect could also be observed in a job interview and whether it may vary depending on how embarrassment is expressed and with the personality of the job applicant. Contrary to what it is observed in an ordinary context, the absence of expression is favored by the recruiters; the expression of embarrassment is rather negatively perceived, especially when it is not controlled. The issue of emotional expressivity during interview will be discussed.

Objective: Experimentally determine whether disgust and embarrassment predict anticipated delay and avoidance in sexual healthcare decision-making and for whom.
Methods: Ninety participants, aged 18-30, completed web-based questionnaires assessing demographics, current health, and past health behaviors. Participants were gender block randomized to conditions in which disgust, embarrassment, or control (no emotion) were induced, before completing health decision-making vignettes covering disgusting and embarrassing aspects of sexual healthcare. Factorial ANOVAs were conducted to determine whether manipulated emotion predicted anticipated delay and avoidance and/or interacted with current health or past behavior in predicting outcomes.
Results: Although there were some complexities in the manipulation, primary analyses demonstrated that disgust and embarrassment predicted greater anticipated delay and avoidance of elicitors, but only among specific groups. Embarrassment predicted anticipated help-seeking delays for embarrassment elicitors (i.e. sexual history assessment and physical examination), while disgust predicted anticipated help-seeking delays involving disgust elicitors (i.e. collecting genital discharge). However, these effects were moderated, with embarrassment only predicting anticipated delays among individuals reporting multiple sexual partners and disgust predicting anticipated delays and avoidance among persons reporting poorer subjective health.
Conclusions: The current report provides among the first empirical demonstrations that emotions such as embarrassment and disgust may be causally implicated in anticipated delays and avoidance in sexual healthcare. Emotion frameworks may be usefully incorporated into clinical and public health efforts to reduce sexual healthcare delays and avoidance.

"Objectives: Although embarrassment may be among the most easily modified emotional barriers to patients seeking health care or testing, work in the area of colorectal cancer (CRC) has been restricted by the absence of suitable instrumentation. The current report describes the development and validation of a self-report instrument assessing two specific aspects of CRC screening embarrassment and their links to screening outcomes.
Design: Convenience sampling was used to recruit 245 European American, African American, and immigrant Jamaican community-dwelling men and women (aged 45 – 75 years) living in Brooklyn, New York.
Methods: Participants completed the measure of CRC screening embarrassment, an array of convergent and divergent validity measures including dispositional embarrassment, general medical embarrassment, neuroticism, trait emotion, social desirability, previous treatment avoidance because of embarrassment, relevant health characteristics and a brief CRC screening history.
Results: As expected, CRC screening embarrassment was not unidimensional and had two reliable and distinct components, one concentrated on faecal/rectal embarrassment and the other on embarrassment arising from unwanted intimacy during examinations. In addition to demonstrating patterns of convergent and divergent validity consistent with their separation, multivariate analyses indicated that faecal/rectal embarrassment (but not intimacy concerns) predicted CRC screening frequency.
Conclusions: The current report extends current understanding by identifying the specific sources of embarrassment that may contribute to patients’ avoidance of CRC screening. Directions for future study and implications for clinical practice and interventions are discussed."

Embarrassment is a negative but prosocial emotion, which often arises from the transgression of a social norm. Its expression thus plays a crucial role in the social perception. The aim of this paper is to document this role during both ordinary and extraordinary situations (i.e., with stakes). Using scenarios' method, 27 participants and 100 recruiters evaluated persons expressing embarrassment or not. Study 1 showed that during ordinary situations, nonverbal expression of embarrassment led to make a good impression by signalling desire of appeasement and prosociality. In contrast, Study 2 revealed that during a job interview, verbal expression of embarrassment through defensive tactics was rather negatively perceived. The manipulation of emotions as emotive communication tools will be discussed.

This study focused upon responses to the emotion of embarrassment. Specifically, the situations causing embarrassment, the degree of perceived embarrassment and the agent of the embarrassment were examined as predictive of the embarrassed party's responses. These same three factors, as well as the response of the embarrassed person, were examined in association with the responses of others. In addition, the issue of multiple responses to embarrassment by the embarrassed party was examined. Self-report data werecollected from 387 persons ranging in age from 17 to 90 years. Log-linear analyses revealed strong associations between both the type of situation and the degree of embarrassment and the type of situation and the agent of the act. The type of situation did indeed predict responses by persons involved in the event. The degree of embarrassment was predictive of neither the types of responses utilized by the embarrassed party nor the others present. Theagent of the incident was strongly associated with responses of the embarrassed party, but was not associated with others’ responses. Responses of an embarrassed party were associated with the responses of others present. Finally, it was found that combinations of responses by the embarrassed party were discovered but were not associated with the situation nor with the degree of embarrassment.