The Effect Of Embarrassment On Helping Behabior

Embarrassment is a kind of self-conscious emotions, which guides human behavior to remain within the boundaries of social and cultural norms.When individuals realize that their behavior has violated the social norms or self representation,they feel embarrassed. Compare to other basic emotion,embarrassment is a complicated emotion. There are more cognitive processes involved,which assess whether the behavior accord with self concept and social rules.Due to the uncomfortable experience caused by the embarrassed events,embarrassment is usually treated as negative emotions. As embarrassment appears in social situations,and closely related to cognitive processes, it probably have certain effects on human behavior.In the field of emotion research, people have a stronger interest in how emotion impact on behaviors.This kind of researches have two characteristics.The first is that researchers explore the impact of emotions based on valence.They tend to divide the emotions into negative emotions and positive emotions. In fact, when it comes to the specific study,we should choose a of specific emotion, and the results are inconsistent. It suggests that we can’t judge how emotion influence behavior on the valence. For example, anger and sadness, which are both negative emotion, but have different effects on helping behavior. The second is that the studies mainly focus on the common basic emotions,such as anger,sadness and fear.but there are few studies about the impact of complex emotions. For there are more cognitive processes involved in these emotions, they are more likely to affect human behavior. So it is of great value and significance to find how this kind of emotion affect behaviors.To sum up,ti is very necessary and meaningful to discuss how certain emotions in a certain situation affect behavior. Embarrassment,as a kind of important social emotions and complicated self-conscious emotion,how influence the helping behavior.In order to understand the embarrassment appear in social situation,the present study include two experiments. Experiment1examined the effect of embarrassment to helping behavior. Experiment2examined wether the recipients’response affect individual’s helping behavior. The experiments suggest that:(1) embarrassment reduced willingness to offering help.(2) The recipients’awkward resolving behavior did’t reduce the embarrassment.(3) The recipients’awkward resolving behavior can promote helping behavior.