Psychophysiological Correlates of Embarrassment Emotion: A Comparative Study Between Shy Males and Females

Embarrassment is a social emotion that stands out due to its relatively short duration. It depends on being witnessed by others where the relationship between the actor and the witness is not close. Surprisingly, despite its importance and relevance, very few studies investigated the embarrassment emotion psychophysiologically. Certainly, a comprehensive study of the embarrassment emotion will benefit the affective computing community and push integrating such emotion into our technological affective systems forward. In our study, we compare the psychophysiological correlates of embarrassment emotion between shy males and females. We collected the electrodermal activity (EDA) and electrocardiogram (ECG) data obtained during experimentally induced embarrassment from 9 shy male subjects. We compare our data to the results of another work where the ECG and EDA data are also collected but for shy female subjects. Our goal is to highlight gender differences in the psychophysiological markers of the embarrassment emotion. Electrodermal behavior was similar and there were no gender differences. Interestingly, gender differences surfaced when ECG data was being studied. Unlike shy females, shy males' heart rate decreases when they are embarrassed. We suspect that the heart rate differences could be the reason behind blushing being more pervasive and prominent in females than males.