The Emotions

Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions

Rom Harre, W Gerrod Parrott, Rom Harre, W Gerrod Parrott

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1996
• Print ISBN: 9780803979307, 9780803979291
• eBook ISBN: 9781446237946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

`There is much that is fascinating here. Long-established experiments and conclusions are rubbished and reinterpreted, long-established assumptions and beliefs about emotions are soundly trounced, and generally a good going-over is delivered to the whole field... it is such a blockbuster that one can only reel backwards and tell anyone studying the subject that they would be crazy not to get it? - Self & Society

This fascinating book overviews the psychology of the emotions in its broadest sense, tracing historical, social, cultural and biological themes and analyses. The contributors - some of the leading figures in the field - produce a new theoretical synthesis by drawing together these strands.

From the standpoint of the function of the emotions in everyday life, the authors focus on: the discursive role played by the emotions in expressing judgements about, attitudes to and contrition for actions done by the self and others, and how certain emotions - such as guilt, shame, embarrassment, chagrin and regret - seem to play a role in social control; the variation and diversity in emotion, which provides scope for exploring how patterns of emotion contrast in different societies, across gender lines, at different historical times, and between children and adults; and the way in which the body is shaped and its functions influenced by culturally maintained patterns of emotion displays.

PART I

THE SOCIAL DIMENSION OF EMOTIONS

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Chapter 2

Embarrassment and the Threat to Character

W. Gerrod Parrott and Rom Harré

The cognitive discursive structure of embarrassment, its displays and its occasions

In our view, embarrassment, as an emotion of social control, is conformable to a generally discursive approach to the understanding of social phenomena, in that we see emotion displays (and feelings in those cultures that recognize them as relevant to emotions) as having both semantic content and illocutionary force as the performance of social acts. At the same time there clearly is a physiological aspect in the genesis of an emotion display. These displays are rarely preceded by overt deliberation. The aetiology of the tendency to display embarrassment will have to be found in a subtle combination of natural expressions and the training into social habits.

What are the functions of embarrassment? Goffman (1967b) has suggested that there are three subtly related acts that are performed in such displays. Underlying all is the expression of the judgement that other people will think that something about us or something we have done is improper in the context. (Of course, one’s belief that this is so may be false!) In displaying embarrassment we express a kind of apology for the real or imagined fault. And, as Goffman points out, the display also serves to present an actor as one who is cognizant of the relevant rules and conventions. Only against the background of such knowledge could inadequacies be realized. So, despite the slip, one is to be seen as a committed member of the society – one does not brazen it out! We shall take this account as a starting point, developing our treatment around it. It is not hard to see that this account construes embarrassment as an ‘emotion of social control’.

Occasions and sources of embarrassment

We must begin by discussing some of the occasions of embarrassment. They can be matters of the body-in-public, such as incorrect or exaggerated postures, wrong clothes for the occasion, or improper appearances, like prominent ears. They can be matters of social behaviour, such as insensitive conversational inputs, for instance an ill-placed ethnic joke, or an incorrect pronunciation of a foreign word, such as pronouncing the name of the river where West met East in the Second World War, ‘Elb’ instead of ‘Elbe’. They can be matters of intellect, such as getting hold of the wrong end of the stick in a discussion. The particulars under each of these broad headings are legion. Nor are these categories sharply differentiated. They overlap in various complex ways. Blowing one’s nose on one’s fingers on ordinary social occasions (a practice attributed to Lincoln by his enemies) is not only an improper way of dealing with a biological necessity, but also displays a louche social personality and massive ignorance of the customs of polite society. Yet, the very people who discretely use a tissue for this purpose would be unembarrassed in following Lincoln’s example if far out on the ski slopes. Embarrassment displays have a ‘range of convenience’.

Embarrassment is not only tied to disturbances that come from a sense of personal inadequacies. It can be suffered vicariously. It can be felt and less often displayed when someone with whom one has a close relationship displays a deficit in performance or manners, in sensibility, in bodily display, in intellectual competence and so on. It can also be suffered when one is singled out even if it is in a self-enhancing way, as the recipient of honour and praise.

There are other emotion displays that seem to belong in the same group, for instance shame, guilt and chagrin. While the two former (discussed in detail in Chapters 3 and 4) are characterized by the fact that they seem to be occasioned by public exposures and private realizations of moral deficits, chagrin is closer to a species of embarrassment in that it occurs when a person fails to achieve something that they [he or she] had publicly committed themselves to accomplish. In the case of chagrin it is not so much the role that is in question as competence in some well-defined task.

Emotions and emotionologies

In opening up a territory for psychological investigation we need to be able to delineate the phenomena that are to be the targets of our study. Since we live our lives ‘within’ local variants of our mother tongues, all psychological investigations must begin with a survey of the way the relevant vocabulary is currently (or, in historical psychology, once was) used. The results of such preliminary studies have come to be called ‘emotionologies’. There is a subtle relation between emotionologies and the results we obtain by studying the actual display of emotions in concrete situations. We shall return to explore that relation in detail.

Complexities in the use of emotion words

Dictionary definitions or paradigms? In domains other than emotion it seems clear enough that many concepts are multivocal, their applications spread over a field of uses which bear only a family resemblance to one another. This fact makes for some problems with the semantics of many common expressions. We believe that emotion words too, are multivocal. In general there are two main ways of expressing the content of a type word, say ‘grandmother’. There is a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the word, conditions which are the source of most dictionary definitions, such as ‘grandmother means mother of one’s mother or father’. But most people have some sort of ‘picture’ of a prototypical grandmother. Both ways of expressing the content of kinship terms seem to be used by people. This may be because identifying an instance of a type may be a different cognitive task from classifying various items as instances of a kind. In most domains there is no incompatibility between working with necessary and sufficient conditions and working with prototypes. Exploring the field of use of an expression like ‘chagrin’, used to describe an emotion within the general ambit of embarrassment, may require attention to both ways of expressing the content of a type term.

Conjunctive and disjunctive definitions Logicians have used the distinction between conjunctive and disjunctive definitions to give some formal expression to Wittgenstein’s conception of a field of uses that are ordered by family resemblance. A conjunctive definition, say of ‘cat’, consists of a list of attributes all of which must be present for a specimen to count as a cat. The list constitutes a set of conditions which are severally necessary and jointly sufficient. A disjunctive definition, say of ‘carbon’, consists of a list of attributes any subset of which can certify a specimen as an instance of that element. Each disjunct expresses a sufficient condition for the application of the term. Something is properly called ‘carbon’ if it is either sparkling diamond, slippery graphite or black amorphous soot. Emotion words could be defined conjunctively by citing the necessary and sufficient conditions for their use, yet could also be defined disjunctively depending on the salience of one or the other feature in particular contexts. In some contexts ‘anger’ may refer to a violent display, and in others to a grim but constrained expression of tension. Furthermore, for ordinary people a concept such as ‘anger’ might be used by reference to both conjuctive and disjunctive conditions. They may also use conceptions of typical cases, easily identifiable symptoms, memorable instances, extremely intense states, and the like. The various ways of construing the concept would each be useful for a different task.

The relation between technical terms and everyday uses

There would seem to be a limit with respect to how far the concepts of psychological theory can diverge from the way the relevant psychological vocabulary is used in everyday life. Of necessity a theorist’s concepts of ‘anger’, ‘embarrassment’, ‘pride’ and so on must be based on those employed by some cultural group through their use of their local vocabulary of emotion words. Without that constraint we will not be confident that the terms a theorist uses will pick out the same phenomena as the lay person’s terms. However, the interplay between ordinary and technical language is quite subtle. It is possible that careful studies of emotion displays and the circumstances in which they occur may change both technical and everyday categorizations. Whales are no longer considered fishes even by the users of ordinary language. But how is it that displays of embarrassment and the conditions under which they occur can diverge from what ordinary folk would understand by ‘embarrassment’? It is because the words that we use for emotions do not usually figure in displays of emotion. When we hear someone say ‘I’m very angry with you’ the chances are that this is a ritual rebuke rather than an expression of genuine anger. And so it seems for the uses of the word ‘embarrassed’. Those who say things like ‘I’m very embarrassed’ are usually using the expression as a ritual opening for presenting an apology. It is perfectly possible then for the occasions and displays of embarrassment to be inadequately described by the relevant words from an emotion vocabulary. This means that the everyday meanings of emotion words are surely somewhat open to modification as a result of psychological studies of phenomena first picked out by the use of the ordinary vocabulary. If studies of the phenomena of embarrassment, say, lead to uses of the relevant vocabulary which are highly discrepant with ordinary usage, an account of how the ordinary usage can be mapped onto the technical usage must be supplied and the need for such a mapping justified.

The conceptual space of ‘embarrassment’: a family resemblance concept

How there can be three theories of embarrassment

Wittgenstein (1953) introduced the family resemblance idea to describe the semantic fields of expressions that have several interconnected but different uses. He warned repeatedly against the fallacy of assuming that there must be a common element in the phenomena which make up the diverse field of use of many important words, if only we could find it. ‘Embarrassment’ seems to be just such a word. Its uses are best traced out as a field of family resemblances rather than different realizations of some underlying common essence (Parrott and Harré, 1991). We can explain how there can be three major ‘theories’ of embarrassment by pointing out that there are three regions of the family resemblance field for which the words ‘embarrassed’, ‘embarrassing’, ‘embarrassment’ and so on are used.

One region is described by dramaturgical theories of embarrassment. In one such account Silver et al. (1987) propose that people construe embarrassment as expressing a person’s perception that he or she cannot perform coherently in a certain social situation. Performing a role is such an important prerequisite to satisfactory social interaction that people become distressed and uncomfortable when they find themselves unable to do so and become flustered as they unsuccessfully try to think of a coherent way to behave. This flustering is independent of whether the situation provoking it will threaten a person’s self-esteem or arouse concern about other people’s impressions of them. For example when a woman discovers that she is the guest of honour at a surprise party she may be embarrassed even amid the acclaim. In this view, little more must be added to the classic sociological accounts other than a postulate that flustering and distress are the psychological concomitants that express the perception that one is temporarily deprived of a social role.

In a contrasting account, Modigliani (1968) describes a second region of embarrassments’s family resemblance field, proposing that it is a perception of loss of self-esteem that is expressed by a display of embarrassment. In this account embarrassment expresses (a) a person’s belief that an audience finds his or her performance to be inadequate to the role being projected and (b) that person’s resulting loss of self-esteem with respect to some quality relevant to that role. The crucial difference between these two patterns of embarrassment lies at stage two. In Modigliani’s analysis, embarrassment will occur if and only if the actor comes to see him- or herself as inadequate in a way relevant to the interaction. In the analysis proposed by Silver et al. (1987), embarrassment has no necessary relation to self-esteem, only to the ability to perform a role.

A third region of usage is described by theories that maintain that displays of embarrassment express ‘social anxiety’ that stems from the belief that other people have formed an undesirable impression of one. In one such account, Miller and Leary (1992) propose that embarrassment arises from a person’s concern that their behaviour will lead other people to form unfavourable impressions or evaluations of them. Like Modigliani’s analysis, and unlike that of Silver et al., this ‘social evaluation’ theory links embarrassment to decreased esteem for the embarrassed person; but whereas Modigliani stressed the importance of the embarrassed person’s self-esteem, Miller and Leary stress that person’s perception of the audience’s decreased esteem for them.

These should not be taken as competing theories of the aetiology of some one, singular phenomenon. Rather they should be taken as highlighting distinctive regions in the loosely structured field of occasions in which judgements and perceptions of one’s inadequacy are expressed in fluster, blushing and the like, the familiar syndrome of embarrassment. On one sort of occasion embarrassment expresses one’s sense of a loss of self-esteem, but in a large class of cases a sense of inadequacy in performance or loss of role confidence is all that is involved. Again, there may or may not be a feeling of social anxiety, for example as to how one’s actions and appearances are being assessed by others.

In one cluster of cases the words from the embarrassment lexicon are used to identify those feelings and displays that express one’s intuition that one can no longer sustain one’s role in some situation, nor smoothly adopt another. The embarrassment vocabulary is also used in some situations for feelings and displays which express the anxiety or concern one feels when one believes that one has made an unfavourable impression on other people. And the same vocabulary is also used in yet other situations for those feelings and displays that express one’s sense that some aspect of oneself must be considered to be more defective than one would like. As in the prototypic three-circle Venn diagram, these three clusters partially overlap one another. On some occasions the embarrassment vocabulary is used when two regions of usage apply, and in some cases of intense embarrassment all three will apply: feelings and displays of embarrassment on these occasions express one’s awkwardness, and one’s concerns about other people’s impressions of oneself, and one’s sense of inadequacy in the situation.

Surely one source of the family resemblance joining these regions is that they often co-occur in the most intense and prototypical instances of embarrassment. One of our students has related a moment of extreme embarrassment that nicely illustrates that portion of the Venn diagram where all three circles overlap. It occurred during a laboratory session of her college chemistry class, near the end of a complex four-hour experiment. As she raised her beaker to make the final measurement, she broke the beaker, which splashed hot water on her, which caused her to break a thermometer and upset some powdered chemicals, producing a cloud which spread throughout the room. Her classmates laughed at her, and, not surprisingly, she felt embarrassed. She flushed bright red, she began sweating and trembling and burst into tears.

She reports aspects of all three accounts of embarrassment. The dramaturgic account addresses her awkwardness in contradicting her role as a competent chemist and her flustering as she failed to repair this role or adopt a new one. The spectacular nature of her accident and of the audience’s reaction prevent her or the audience from acting as if nothing had happened, or as if such occurrences were consistent with her role. The one available dramaturgic manoeuvre would appear to have been to adopt a new role consistent with the accident, say, that of ‘dismayed student’; too disappointed with the loss of her labour to be aware of her classmates’ attention and laughter, or perhaps that of the performing clown, or that of a habitually clumsy person – in American slang the ‘class klutz’ – announcing in effect ‘Oops! There I go again.’

That none of these manoeuvres was attempted – or perhaps even contemplated – can be understood by co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Affiliations of the Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Some Complexities in the Study of Emotions
• Part I: The Social Dimension of Emotions
• Part II: Historical and Cultural Variety in Emotions
• Part III: The Biological Dimensions of Emotion
• Name Index
• Subject Index