The awkwardness of feeling for you : The pro-social role(s) of empathic embarrassment and its neural basis

Empathic embarrassment is an emotional state that belongs to the self-conscious category of emotions. It is an uncomfortable condition where someone feels embarrassed over another person’s mishap or violation of social norms. It is prosocial in that one is motivated to help a person who expresses embarrassment. To experience it, one needs to be able to imagine how the other person is feeling and how one would feel if the situation happened to oneself. One is likelier to feel empathic embarrassment if one likes the person who is experiencing the mishap or if one has experienced the mishap oneself. This thesis investigates whether empathic embarrassment is a prosocial emotion and what neural basis empathic embarrassment has. The results show that empathic embarrassment is perceived as a prosocial emotion, while the areas that are the most involved are the anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula, and medial prefrontal cortex.