Uncontrollable yet predictable, obvious yet inexplicable, blushing can be agony when we are made to feel humiliated, embarrassed or simply embarrassed.
A new study suggests that a key factor in blushing is this heightened sense of self-consciousness, of feeling seen or exposed, rather than any cognitive calculation of what other people think of us.
Good to know, thanks to a group of 40 teenagers and 20-somethings who were made to watch footage of themselves singing karaoke while lying in an MRI machine. Although there is more evidence on the link between blushing and self-consciousness, it doesn’t necessarily mean we can stop it from happening.
In 1872, Charles Darwin aptly described blushing as “the strangest and most human of all expressions.” It’s only intensified when someone points out that you turn scarlet, while being accused of the act can also make you do it, whether you’re guilty or not.
The explanations for the physiological response are clear enough; a rush of blood to the face that reddens the cheeks and sometimes the ears, neck, upper chest and forehead.
But as for why someone blushes, this has puzzled people for years. Is it shame or embarrassment from a clumsy mistake or something that might be a well-deserved compliment, or feeling like you’re on display for everyone?
Do people blush because they are suddenly concerned about what others think of them and feel judged? Or is it an involuntary, emotional reaction that occurs before we’ve had a moment to think about it?
A 2004 study found that blushing can be more intense on one side of the face than the other – if someone stares at the person next to them while singing. But many of these past studies, like the most recent one, are so small that no strong conclusions can be drawn.
“While fear pallor is explicable in terms of a diversion of blood flow from the skin to the skeletal muscles, it is less obvious why the embarrassment of certain types of social difficulties should be accompanied by increased blood flow to the face,” psychologist Ray Crozier wrote in 2010 for the British Psychological Society.
In this new study, Milica Nikolic, a psychology researcher at the University of Amsterdam, and her colleagues tried to unravel some of these questions about blushing with brain scans of their karaoke singers, shown footage of themselves or other people singing.
Surprisingly, only a few studies have mapped patterns of brain activity in people made to feel embarrassed or worried, and although they have noted physiological signs of increased arousal, none have measured indicators of blushing specifically.
Nikolic and colleagues found that female volunteers’ cheeks got hotter when they watched themselves versus others singing, which isn’t all that surprising.
Functional MRI (fMRI) brain scans were more revealing. They showed that blushing activated brain areas involved in emotional arousal and attention, while regions involved in mentalizing—that is, imagining or thinking about your own or someone else’s behavior, thoughts, or intentions—were “conspicuously absent.”
“These findings contribute to ongoing theoretical discussions about the nature of blushing and provide support for the idea that higher-order social-cognitive processes may not be necessary for the occurrence of blushing,” Nikolic and colleagues conclude.
However, the team said their results should be “interpreted with caution” because the patterns of brain activity associated with mental processes “as complex and widespread as arousal, attention, and mentalization are not completely different.”
Whether or not these results can be replicated in a larger, more diverse group of people — not just female students — also remains to be seen. A so-called replication crisis has plagued psychological research for decades, in part a reflection of the types of people these studies tend to recruit as volunteers.
The study was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
