Psychological Bulletin1997. \W. 122. No, 3, 250-270Copyright 1997 by the American Psychological Association. Inc.0033-2909(97/53.00Embarrassment: Its Distinct Form and Appeasement FunctionsDacher KeltnerUniversity of California, BerkeleyBrenda N. BuswellUniversity of Wisconsin—MadisonThe authors address 2 questions about embarrassment. First, Is embarrassment a distinct emotion?The evidence indicates that the antecedents, experience, and display of embarrassment, and to alimited extent its autonomic physiology, are distinct from shame, guilt, and amusement and sharethe dynamic, temporal characteristics of emotion. Second, What are the theoretical accounts ofembarrassment? Three accounts focus on the causes of embarrassment, positing that it follows theloss of self-esteem, concern for others' evaluations, or absence of scripts to guide interactions. Afourth account focuses on the effects of the remedial actions of embarrassment, which correctpreceding transgressions. A fifth account focuses on the functional parallels between embarrassmentand nonhuman appeasement. The discussion focuses on unanswered questions about embarrassment.Embarrassment is not an irrational impulse breaking throughsocially prescribed behavior but part of this orderly behavior itself.(Goffman, 1956, pp. 270-271)Embarrassment has a checkered history in the social sciences.For certain theorists, embarrassment is woven into the very fab-ric of harmonious social relations, serving as an emotionalmechanism that enables people to maintain the stability of moralcommunities in the seemingly ordinary interactions of quotidianlife (Goffman, 1967; Miller & Leary, 1992; Scheff, 1988).People's experience and display of embarrassment, from thisperspective, play a critical role in socialization practices, suchas teasing and punishment, the motivation of moral behaviorand conformity, the development of the conscience, and thenegotiation of social roles and status (Ausubel, 1955; Clark,1990; Keltner, Young, & Buswell, in press; Kochanska, 1993;Miller, 1996; Miller & Leary, 1992; Scheff, 1988).Traditional emotion researchers, however, have largely ig-nored embarrassment. Darwin (1872, pp. 309-346) failed toconsider embarrassment in his analysis of the blush.1 Subsequenttheorists have not extensively considered embarrassment in theirtheorizing or empirical studies (Izard, 1977; Lazarus, 1991;Plutchik, 1984; Roseman, Wiest, & Swartz, 1994; Smith &Ellsworth, 1985; Tomkins, 1963). Theorists have described em-barrassment as a less intense, less serious variant of shame(Lewis, 1993; Tomkins, 1963), a form of social anxiety(Schlenker & Leary, 1982), a dejection-related emotion whoseprototypical member is sadness (Higgins, 1987; Shaver,Schwartz, Kirson, & O'Connor, 1987), a secondary emotionDacher Keltner, Department of Psychology, University of California,Berkeley; Brenda N. Buswell, Department of Psychology, University ofWisconsin—Madison.We are grateful to Lisa Capps, Paul Ekman, James Gross, and JuneP. Tangney for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this article.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to DacherKeltner, Department of Psychology, University of California, 3210 Tbl-man Hall, Berkeley, California 94720-1650. Electronic mail may be sentvia Internet to [email protected].(Lewis, Stanger, Sullivan, & Barone, 1991), or a more cogni-tively complex emotion (e.g., Campos, Barrett, Lamb, Gold-smith, & Stenberg, 1983).Recently, however, research has begun to illuminate the defin-ing characteristics and functions of the "self-conscious emo-tions," which include embarrassment, shame, guilt, and pride(Edelmann, 1987, 1990; Keltner, 1995; Lewis, 1993; Miller,1992, 1996; Miller & Leary, 1992; Miller & Tangney, 1994;Parrott & Smith, 1991; Tangney, 1990, 1991, 1992; Tangney &Fischer, 3 995). The emergent study of the self-conscious emo-tions raises two questions whose answers provide the frameworkof this article. First, Is embarrassment a distinct emotion? Toanswer this question, we present the logic that guides the deter-mination of whether an emotion is distinct and then review theevidence relevant to whether the forms of embarrassment—its antecedents, appraisals, experience, nonverbal display, andautonomic physiology—are distinct from other emotions, inparticular, shame, guilt, amusement, fear, and sadness. Havingascertained the forms of embarrassment, we then address thesecond question guiding this review—What accounts for theresponses associated with embarrassment? To address this ques-tion, we review five accounts that focus on different theoreticalquestions and aspects of embarrassment. Three accounts primar-ily focus on the immediate causes of the experience of embar-rassment, a fourth focuses on the social effects of embar-rassment, and a fifth addresses the functions of embarrassment.Evidence for Embarrassment as a Distinct EmotionThe search for distinctions among emotions has been a long-standing interest (Darwin, 1872; James, 1884), guiding thestudy of emotion antecedents and appraisal processes (e.g., Bou-cher & Brandt, 1981; Lazarus, 1991; Roseman et al., 1994;Smith & Ellsworth, 1985), nonverbal communication (e.g., Ek-man, 1984; Ekman, Sorenson, & Friesen, 1969; Izard, 1971),' Darwin did refer to two kinds of shame related to the blush: shamerelated to moral transgressions and shame related to breaches of eti-quette. The second kind of shame seems to correspond to embarrassment.250FORMS AND FUNCTIONS OF EMBARRASSMENT251and central and autonomic nervous system activity (e.g., Ca-cioppo, Klein, Berntson, & Hatfield, 1993; Davidson, Ekman,Saron, Senulis, & Friesen, 1990; Ekman, Levenson, & Friesen,1983; James, 1884; Levenson, 1992). Establishing a taxonomyof distinct emotions serves as a basis for theories that explicateemotion and the functions of emotion-related responses (Rose-man et al., 1994) and serves as the basis for the study of cross-cultural variation in emotion (Haidt & Keltner, 1997).The search for distinct emotions, with intellectual precedentin the classical philosophers (Solomon, 1976), was shaped byDarwin (1872), who focused on a limited set of emotions inhis book, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals.Contemporary emotion theorists, some of whom are listed inTable 1, have tended to agree that anger, disgust, distress orsadness, enjoyment or happiness, fear, surprise, and possiblycontempt are distinct emotions. With the recent exception ofEkman