Children's Understanding of Embarrassment: a Social-Psychological and Cognitive-Developmental Investigation (Emotion, Role-Taking).

Abstract

Embarrassment has implications for social interaction and psychological adjustment. Social psychologists have isolated four "key features" that are critical to the experience of embarrassment in adults. These include an awareness of deficient demeanor and observing others as well as a perception of others as negative evaluators and causal agents of emotion. This study examined the relationship between these "key features", childrens' role-taking abilities, and their understanding of embarrassment. Sixty children ages 5 to 10 years, were shown a series of picture-vignettes depicting children involved in situations of impropriety, incompetence, and excessive attention. They were asked to describe how the pictured child might feel and why as well as how the audience in each situation might influence that emotion. Subjects were also asked to tell about their own embarrassment experiences and respond to a measure of role-taking (Rothenberg 1970). Results indicate that whereas only 23% of the subjects in the youngest age group were able to identify embarrassment, 87% of these in the oldest age group did so with the largest increase around age 7. Pattern analyses revealed that identifications were linked with an awareness of all of the "key features" only for older children. Situations of impropriety and incompetence were most readily seen as embarrassing and this was associated with an awareness of deficient demeanor and of the audience as negatively evaluative. Children were less likely to see situations of excess attention as embarrassing. Particularly for older children, the affect in such encounters was associated with imagined rather than real deficient demeanor. In telling their own stories younger children tended to focus on physical and older children tended to focus on academic incompetence. As a rule, younger children viewed adults and older children viewed peers as the audience most likely to induce embarrassment. Role-taking was significantly correlated with embarrassment but with only several of the theoretically pertinent key features.