Embarrassment's effect on facial processing

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.