- Embarrassment
- A self-conscious emotion arising from real or imagined exposure to a social audience following an unintentional violation of social norms or expectations. Typically involves a sense of fleeting unwanted attention and mild disruption to self-presentation rather than the deeper self-threat of shame.
- Self-conscious emotions
- Emotions — including embarrassment, shame, guilt, and pride — that require self-awareness, awareness of social standards, and evaluation of the self against those standards. They emerge later in development than basic emotions, typically after 18 months as objective self-awareness develops.
- Embarrassment display
- A reliable nonverbal signal identified by Keltner & Buswell (1997): gaze downward and away, a controlled smile with lip presses and intermittent smile suppression, face-touching gestures, and sideways head movements. The display is distinct from amusement and appears cross-culturally.
- Appeasement signal
- A social signal that communicates submission, norm-acceptance, and non-threat. Embarrassment functions as an appeasement signal: showing embarrassment after a social mistake communicates that you care about social norms, which increases observers' trust and liking toward you.
- Blushing
- An involuntary reddening of the face associated with embarrassment and social exposure. Because it cannot be faked, blushing serves as an honest signal of social anxiety and norm awareness. Darwin devoted a chapter of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals to blushing, calling it the most peculiar and most human of all expressions.