Are Perceptions of Emotion in the Eye of the Beholder? A Social Relations Analysis of Judgments of Embarrassment
College women watched each other perform an embarrassing or innocuous task in a study of emotion recognition using the social relations model. In groups of 5, 120 women judged the embarrassment and inferred the embarrassability of each of the other group members. The participants also reported the empathic embarrassment they felt while watching each of the other group members. There was considerable consensus among observers of strong embarrassment, but perception of weaker embarrassment was more idiosyncratic. The level of a performer's trait embarrassability was apparent to observers of the innocuous task, and, across both conditions, embarrassable observers assumed that others were embarrassable. Empathic embarrassment for others was clearly subjective, depending more on who was watching than on who was being watched.