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Lewis (1987) ja Wurmser (1994) esittävät häpeän reaktioksi, joka aiheutuu hyväksyvän vastavuoroisuuden (ihminen tuntee itsensä ymmärretyksi) puutteesta. Sosiaalisten pelkojen lähtökohtana voi olla liian isot tai varhaiset häpeäkokemukset (varsinkin toistuvina). Esimerkiksi lapsuuden hylkäämiskokemukset tai koulukiusaaminen.

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Ever wonder why some people can't stand the over-the-top awkwardness of characters on " The Office" while others love it? It may have to do with the ability to feel empathy, according to new research from the Philipps-University Marburg in Germany.

Researchers analyzed how people experience vicarious embarrassment -- that cringe we feel when the host of a party makes a toast with a piece of spinach in his teeth -- and found that it was closely tied to feelings of empathy and empathy centers in the brain.

A group of 619 German twenty-somethings were shown a series of vignettes depicting a stranger getting into embarrassing situations, and then asked to rate how much embarrassment they felt for him. Sometimes the stranger was oblivious to their faux-pas, like the spinach-in-the-teeth example. Sometimes they were painfully aware -- one showed a person bending over and splitting his pants.

Though empathy is usually thought of as pain we experience with someone -- they suffer and we suffer with them -- researchers found that the subjects felt vicarious embarrassment even when the strangers in question were blissfully unaware of their pratfalls.

"We are wired for empathy," says Dr. Marco Iacoboni, professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA. "Human instinct is to be empathic. We can't help it." For centuries, he says, scientists thought of empathy upside-down: that we were animals fighting for survival and it was only our higher brain functions that allowed us to feel cooperative emotions such as empathy. Neuroscientists are now finding that our brains are wired on a very basic level to feel empathy for others, though obviously the capacity for empathy varies from person to person.

In general, however, neuroscientists are finding that the more empathic a person is in general, the higher the level of embarrassment and discomfort they feel for others when they see another's embarrassing situation.

"It may be that they automatically imagine themselves as being that person in that [embarrassing] situation," says Frieder Paulus, a co-author and psychologist at Philipps-University Marburg. This may be what leads some to switch the channel when they see shows that capitalize on social embarrassment, such a pratfall on " Dancing With the Stars" or a hopeless performance on " American Idol."

"Some people think it's funny and others, you can tell it's painful for them to watch. You see the faces they make like they are hurting themselves," Paulus says.

And in fact, pain centers in the brain reliably light up when we view others' misfortunes. The anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), parts of the brain called the "pain matrix," are activated when we feel pain for others.

Vicarious Embarrassment: The New Schadenfreude?

Though social scientists are just beginning to understand what is going on in the brain when we watch someone slip publically, feeling embarrassed for others is a familiar emotion. In Germany it's known as "fremdscham" -- literally "external shame," the empathic cousin to the well-known "schadenfreude" that better explains the humor and delight people who love "The Office" find in the characters' social flummoxing.

In the U.S., the slang "tartingly" is sometimes used for this vicarious embarrassment, as in: "I felt so tartingly when he proposed in public over the stadium jumbotron and the girl said 'no.'"

But if our brains our wired to feel emotional pain in the face of these "tartingly" moments, why do these social slip ups feature in so many forms of comedy?

It's difficult to say why some people respond in this way, Iacoboni says, "I think that the tendency of looking into the funny aspects of this stuff is a way of dealing with it. Seeing you get into an embarrassing situation, I may feel the pain of it as if it were me, and one way of coping with that experience of pain is by laughing at it."

The study was published Wednesday in the journal PLoS One.

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Vicarious Embarassment a Pain in the Brain

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It's a familiar emotion: that cringe of discomfort when your friend is unintentionally offensive in public or your date comes back from the bathroom with toilet paper stuck to his shoe. Social scientists call it vicarious embarrassment; most people just call it awkward.

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Cavan Images / Digital Vision via Getty Images

Ever find yourself physically cringing as you watch those hopeful contestants on American Idol who have no clue that they can't sing? If so, you're probably a highly empathetic person, according to new study published in the journal PloS One.

In fact, the study finds, the experience of vicarious embarrassment affects the same brain regions that light up when you empathize with someone's physical pain. The study adds to a growing body of literature suggesting that physical and emotional pain are processed in the same brain regions, which is probably why we describe ourselves as "hurt" whether we've just been dumped by a lover or broken a leg.

Now add watching someone walk around with toilet paper on their shoe to the list of shared emotional trauma.

The new research suggests not only that we empathize with other people's embarrassment as we do their pain, but that we also experience this vicarious emotion whether or not we the person being embarrassed is aware of their social predicament.

In the study, which was led by Soren Krach of Phillipps University in Marburg, Germany, 480 women and 139 men were asked to rate how they would feel if they themselves experienced certain embarrassing scenarios or observed others in the same situation. The vignettes included experiences like stumbling during a speech or slipping in the mud - some were accidental faux pas, and others were situations where the person deliberately violated social rules, like belching loudly. In these examples, both the embarrassed person and the audience were aware of the humiliation.

Alternatively situations were described in which the people being embarrassed were unaware of their humiliation, such as walking around unknowingly with their fly unzipped.

When imagining themselves as the embarrassed party, the study participants felt most uncomfortable when putting themselves in accidentally humiliating situations that everyone knew about. However, when asked to imagine observing other people in similar situations, the participants' vicarious embarrassment was even greater - especially in those cases of people who were blind to their own humiliation.

The higher the participants' ratings on a scale of empathy, the greater the discomfort they felt relating to other people's embarrassment. The fact that this was true even when the people in the situation were unaware that they were being embarrassed suggested that the participants' empathy was anticipatory - being projected forward to the moment at which people would discover, for example, having given a speech with their pants open.

Since the more empathetic people did not rate their own embarrassment as higher when they imagined themselves getting humiliated, their discomfort with others' experiences seems to be related to actual empathy, rather than with simply being more likely to feel embarrassed.

A second experiment involved imaging the brains of 32 participants, 17 of whom were women. Again, people who rated higher on empathy showed greater vicarious embarrassment. They also showed higher levels of activation in a brain region called the anterior insula, which is the part of a brain involved in processing the unpleasant emotions associated with pain (as opposed to the location or type of pain). Interestingly, this region is also activated during the experience of disgust.

The study helps explain why we may literally cringe from either pain or embarrassment, whether it's our own or that of someone who doesn't even know they're being humiliated.

More on TIME.com: Why Getting 'High' Increases Acts of Charity

More on TIME.com: Why Spoiled Babies Grow Up to Be Smarter, Kinder Kids

More on TIME.com: The Rich Are Different: More Money, Less Empathy

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Why Your Embarrassment Causes Me So Much Pain

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Ever find yourself physically cringing as you watch those hopeful contestants on American Idol who have no clue that they can't sing? If so, you're probably a highly empathetic person, according to new study published in the journal PloS One.

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Usein sanotaan, että riittävän viisaat ihmiset eivät tunne myötähäpeää, mutta mikä siinä on taustalla?

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- myötähäpeästä voi päästä eroon vain jos tunnistaa sen osana omana luonnollista reagointia
-kun huomaamme olevamme erillisiä toisistamme ihmiset voivat usein olla hyvin riippuvisia läheisten ihmisten hyväksynnästä

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Miksi tunnen myötähäpeää, kun tuntematon ihminen mokaa? Kysymykseen vastaa Mainzin yliopiston sosiaalisen neurotieteen tutkija Sören Krach: "'Myötänolostuminen' olisi oikeampi termi kuin myötähäpeä. Häpeä (engl. 'shame') on tila, jossa ihmisen vakaa käsitys itsestä on uhattuna.

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Miksi tunnen myötähäpeää, kun tuntematon ihminen mokaa?

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Miksi tunnen myötähäpeää, kun tuntematon ihminen mokaa? Kysymykseen vastaa Mainzin yliopiston sosiaalisen neurotieteen tutkija Sören Krach: "'Myötänolostuminen' olisi oikeampi termi kuin myötähäpeä. Häpeä (engl. 'shame') on tila, jossa ihmisen vakaa käsitys itsestä on uhattuna. Tämä sisältö kuuluu HS Digi -tilaukseen Vaihda HS Mini -tilauksesi helposti HS Digiin Haluatko lukea koko artikkelin?

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- myötähäpeää aiheuttavat tilanteet aktivoivat empaattiseksi itsensä luokittelevilla tavallista enemmän epämiellyttäviin tuntemuksiin liittyviä aivoalueita, kuten etummaista pihtipoimua ja etummaista  aivosaarta
- aivoissa aktivoituu sama "interior insula" myötähäpeää ja inhoa kokiessa

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tutkimusten mukaan myötähäpeä on voimakkaampaa jos mokaava ihminen ei ole itse tietoinen virheestään

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- myötähäpeän tunne on verrattavissa ahdistukseen jota voi kokea toisen ihmisen leikatessa vaikkapa sormeen

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- empatia on kyky eläytyä toisen ihmisen näkökulmaan ja tunteisiin
- myötänolostumisen tunne vaatii empatiakykyä, sillä se on empaattinen reaktio
- keskimääriin itsensä empaattiseksi luokittelevat ihmiset tuntevat helpommin myötähäpeää

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- myötähäpeässä ihminen samaistuu empaattisesti toisen normirikkomukseen ja ymmärtää, miten tämä voi tuntea ja ymmärtää, miltä se itsestä tuntuisi
- ei välttämättä negatiivinen tunne, voi olla nmyös nautinnollinen tunne esim. komediaelokuvissa vahingoniloisuus
- esimerkiksi jos jonkun kännykkä soi kesken tunnin juuri pahalla hetkellä

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MIKSI TUNNEN MYÖTÄHÄPEÄÄ, KUN TUNTEMATON IHMINEN MOKAA?

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MIKSI TUNNEN MYÖTÄHÄPEÄÄ, KUN TUNTEMATON IHMINEN MOKAA?

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Emmi ja Helinä 15A