Embarrassment by Rowland S. Miller

Embarrassment by Rowland S. Miller

In the book Embarrassment, Rowland S. Miller deals with all aspects of embarrassment in everyday life. Miller talks about the nature of embarrassment to the ways of over coming embarrassment. He also talks about how embarrassment is a basic emotion and the certain signs of having the emotion. He also talks about the certain types of responses given in a situation. I will talk about the nature of embarrassment, characteristics of embarrassment and the prototypical embarrassment discussed in chapter one.

The chapter I have selected talks about the book as a study of a uniquely human emotion, not the familiar emotion embarrassment, but by different events that follow the emotion. These emotions can be anywhere from being dramatic to being funny to being careless to being even sad. These emotions can follow anything that’s ordinary or everyday behavior. Most people don’t even experience this as children until they mature and gain Socialization skills and cognitive skills of a young adolescence.

One of the other emotions that follows embarrassment is not to the person being embarrassed, but the embarrasser. Say you are the embarrasser and you embarrass someone; friend, colleague, or even a total stranger, and you do it in a way you know the other person is embarrassed (ex. Embarrasser spilling a drink on the embarrassed) and the embarrasser keeping their cool, don't show any emotion but still being apologetic and offering to reimburse for the damage done, then leaves. Will you even like or be able to trust that person? A person that shows more sorrow or regret for what he or she has done by showing reparation and showing embarrassment however, will more likely be able to be trusted.

Now we can look at characteristics of embarrassment by using our imagination. Lets say on a nice day, a jogger is running through the park and notices a person of the opposite sex, doing their usual daily exercise routine and all of a sudden, BAM, the jogger ran into a pole. Instead of sitting on the ground and getting rid of the dizziness and checking to see if the spot on his forehead that he hit on the pole had swelled up any, he runs on. Because he got himself in this embarrassing situation, others around him probably laughed and made fun of him and might have caused him to laugh at the situation at a later time, was not funny at the moment.