Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 34:1 0021– 8308 © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK JTSB Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 0021-8308 © The Executive Management Committee/Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2004 2004 34 1 000 Original Articles Self-consciousness, Exposure, and the Blush W. Ray Crozier Self-consciousness, Exposure, and the Blush W. RAY CROZIER Little is known about the circumstances that give rise to blushing and there have been no systematic attempts to classify and analyze the types of situations where it occurs. The study reported here analyzes a sample of recollections of occasions and a selection of literary episodes. The two sources of evidence yield somewhat different patterns but prominent themes in both are being the centre of attention, whether this is positive, neutral or negative, and the disclosure, or threat of exposure, of a private or sensitive topic. Inspection of example suggests that a blush is associated with self-consciousness. More specifically, it is elicited when circumstances cause someone to take another’s perspective on the self, and this generates awareness of a discrepancy between his or her position and this position as it appears to the other. A blush does not require that the other take an adverse view of the actor’s position. The blush shows sensitivity to the opinions of others and it is its capacity to communicate this that makes it effective in deflecting aggressive or rejecting responses from others. INTRODUCTION Blushing is little understood. It is not at all obvious what a blush is or what distinguishes it from the reddening of the face and increased skin temperature that accompany, say, anger, alcohol consumption, or physical exertion, but are not usually thought of as blushes. Many writers have assumed that it is an expression of embarrassment. For example, Buss (1980, p. 129) considered that blushing is the “hallmark” of embarrassment and Miller (1996, p. 137) concluded that, “on the whole, blushing is a reliable sign of embarrassment”. Thinking about embarrassment and the circumstances that elicit it has been aided by the analysis of recollections of incidents provided by participants in research. This has proved fruitful in devel- oping taxonomies of embarrassing incidents (see Miller, 1996, for an example and a review of such studies) and in testing hypotheses about the causes of embarrass- ment (e.g. Sabini et al., 2002). There have been no equivalent studies of the triggers of blushing. In an attempt to address this deficit, this paper reports an analysis of two samples of instances of blushing, one sample provided by respondents to a questionnaire and one obtained from a word search through a number of works of fiction. It goes on to consider the implications of this analysis for accounts of blushing. Before doing so, it is useful to review some of the limitations of the “embarrassment account” and consider some theories of the causes of blushing. BLUSHING AND EMBARRASSMENT The blush does not fit neatly into an embarrassment account. First, it is arguable that we do not always blush when we are embarrassed. In one study, just over half of research participants invited to recall an embarrassing incident reported that the incident caused them to blush (Parrott & Smith, 1981). Edelmann (1990) presented findings from a cross-cultural survey indicating that the incidence of