Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Concomitants of Facial Blushing during Everyday Social Encounters

Abstract

Facial blushing may usually be undesirable but may have an ameliorative function for some individuals under some circumstances. Researchers have studied the blush in laboratory settings, but not in daily life. In the present research, conducted with young adults, we employed for the first time an event-contingent recording method for assessing facial blushing during every-day social encounters. Blushing was associated with feeling embarrassed, ashamed, and exposed. These findings, though based on correlational analyses, are consistent with the idea that blushing is often unpleasant and can be maladaptive, and may contribute to the common belief that blushing is an undesirable response. Frequent blushers generally reported lower levels of dominant behavior, higher levels of submissive behavior, and perceived their social interaction partners as more powerful and less affiliative. This was independent of whether they blushed or not, suggesting that altered social behaviors and perceptions are associated with blushing-associated traits rather than with the blushing state. The experience of the blush varied as a function of the frequency with which a person blushed. Blushing was associated with higher levels of shame in frequent blushers than in infrequent blushers. In infrequent blushers, blushing was associated with higher levels of pleasant affect, suggesting that for infrequent blushers the blush may occur in positive social encounters.

What's in a blush? Physiological blushing reveals narcissistic children's social‐evaluative concerns

“…Blushing is a sign of appeasement (Leary & Meadows, ): “Those who are blushing are somehow saying that they know, care about, and fear others' evaluation,” and “communicate their sorrow over any possible faults or inadequacies on their part” (Castelfranchi & Poggi, , p. 240). Thus, when people blush, they often feel submissive, and express dependence on others' evaluations of them (aan het Rot, Moskowitz, & De Jong, ). This conflicts with the image that narcissistic children wish to radiate, so they may deny blushing to save their image.…”

Circular Modelling of Circumplex Measurements for Interpersonal Behavior

“…Data Set I concerns a study in personality psychology on blushing in social interactions ( aan het Rot et al, 2015 ). In this study, the Interpersonal Grid (IG; Moskowitz & Zuroff, 2005 ) and the Social Behavior Inventory (SBI: Moskowitz, 1994 ) are used to obtain scores on the IPC.…”

“…In most circumplex research, the two axes Agency and Communion are analyzed separately (see, e.g., aan het Rot et al, 2013 , aan het Rot et al, 2015 , aan het Rot et al, 2017 ; Brekelmans et al, 2005 ; Hopwood et al, 2020 ; Mainhard, Brekelmans, den Brok, & Wubbels, 2011 ; Mainhard, Pennings, Wubbels, & Brekelmans, 2012 ; Pennings et al, 2014 ; Pennings et al, 2018 ; Sadler & Woody, 2003 ). Given that interpersonal theory states that interpersonal behavior should be described as a blend of Agency and Communion and cannot be interpreted correctly based on only one of these dimensions, this is not an ideal way of analyzing IPC data.…”

“…First, to illustrate the advantages of using circular statistics on circumplex data, we will fit a mixed-effects model for circular data ( Nuñez-Antonio & Gutiérrez-Peña, 2014 ) to three different repeated measures circumplex data sets. One data set is on blushing in social interactions ( aan het Rot, Moskowitz, & de Jong, 2015 ) and two data sets on interpersonal teacher behavior ( Brekelmans, Wubbels, & van Tartwijk, 2005 ; Pennings et al, 2018 ). We will refer to these three data sets as the interpersonal behavior data.…”

Early maladaptive schemas in people with a fear of blushing

“…The blush is an automatic psychophysiological response that involves reddening of the skin on the upper torso and face due to an increase in blood flow through surface blood vessels (Drummond, ). Blushing develops during emotions such as embarrassment, guilt, and shame (aan het Rot, Moskowitz, & de Jong, ), and is tied to a perception of social scrutiny or evaluation (Leary & Meadows, ; Leary & Toner, ). Darwin () contended that blushing was a maladaptive by‐product of self‐focused attention, most prevalent in the young and in females who elicited social scrutiny, and least prevalent in infants or those with profound intellectual disability who did not possess a sense of self.…”