Your Flaws Are My Pain: Linking Empathy To Vicarious Embarrassment So¨ ren Krach1,2*, Jan Christopher Cohrs3, Nicole Cruz de Echeverrı´a Loebell4, Tilo Kircher1, Jens Sommer1, Andreas Jansen1, Frieder Michel Paulus1 1 Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Philipps-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany, 2 Department of Neurology, Philipps-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany, 3 School of Psychology, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, United Kingdom, 4 Department of Psychology, Philipps-University Marburg, Marburg, Germany Abstract People vicariously experience embarrassment when observing others’ public pratfalls or etiquette violations. In two consecutive studies we investigated the subjective experience and the neural correlates of vicarious embarrassment for others in a broad range of situations. We demonstrated, first, that vicarious embarrassment was experienced regardless of whether the observed protagonist acted accidentally or intentionally and was aware or unaware that he/she was in an embarrassing situation. Second, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we showed that the anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula, two cortical structures typically involved in vicarious feelings of others’ pain, are also strongly implicated in experiencing the ‘social pain’ for others’ flaws and pratfalls. This holds true even for situations that engage protagonists not aware of their current predicament. Importantly, the activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula positively correlated with individual differences in trait empathy. The present findings establish the empathic process as a fundamental prerequisite for vicarious embarrassment experiences, thus connecting affect and cognition to interpersonal processes. ‘‘When we are living with people who have a delicate sense of propriety, we are in misery on their account when anything unbecoming is committed. So I always feel for and with Charlotte when a person is tipping his chair. She cannot endure it.’’ [Elective Affinities, J. W. Goethe]. Citation: Krach S, Cohrs JC, de Echeverrı´a Loebell NC, Kircher T, Sommer J, et al. (2011) Your Flaws Are My Pain: Linking Empathy To Vicarious Embarrassment. PLoS ONE 6(4): e18675. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018675 Editor: Jan Lauwereyns, Kyushu University, Japan Received October 25, 2010; Accepted March 15, 2011; Published April 13, 2011 Copyright: ß 2011 Krach et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Funding: The authors have no support or funding to report. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. * E-mail: [email protected] Introduction appearance (e.g., zipper open), or failure at privacy regulation [1,2,3]. Imagine the following anecdotal situation: You are attending a Returning to the above anecdote, embarrassment is also conference. While sitting within a fully occupied audience you experienced vicariously. Research shows that vicarious embar- observe the presenter walking down the aisle with toilet paper rassment is evoked even without any connection between the clinging to his back pocket. Before you could take charge of the observer and the protagonist’s predicament and without any situation and make the presenter aware of the unwanted attention responsibility of the observer for the protagonist’s situation [4,5,6]. from everybody, you would be sure to imagine what others must In his classic work Miller [4] hypothesized that maintaining face in think of him and what the source of giggling or averting the gaze social interactions is of such central concern that envisioning would be. The presenter, on the other hand, would walk to the oneself in the place of an embarrassed other might cause one to podium, unaware of why everybody is secretly looking at his suffer empathic embarrassment (p. 9). backside. Despite the presenter’s unspecific emotional state, surrounding bystanders experience strong emotions – vicariously. Neural Correlates of Empathy for Others’ Pain It is these vicariously experienced emotions and their neural To date, research on the neural correlates of empathic processes underpinnings in response to intentionally or accidentally caused has primarily focused on the empathic processing of others’ public shortcomings, pratfalls, or norm violations of others that are physical pain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) the focus of the present research. studies report that affective-motivational components of the so Social emotions such as embarrassment, guilt, pride, or called ‘pain matrix’ [7,8,9], the anterior insula and the anterior shame represent key elements of our human moral apparatus. cingulate cortex (ACC), are most reliably involved in the They have been distinguished from basic emotions (fear, compassionate feeling of pain [10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. Further, happiness, etc.) in various ways [1]. Recent conceptualizations subjective reports on the experienced pain as well as participants’ suggest that embarrassment is a transient reaction to a violation estimates of the intensity of observed pain were positively of social etiquette that endangers one’s particular public image associated with the hemodynamic responses in these regions and can be evoked in different situations. Examples include [12,16,18]. More recently, an fMRI study extended these findings physical pratfalls (e.g., slipping in the mud), cognitive short- and demonstrated that compassion for both physical (i.e. injury) comings, loss of control over the body, shortcomings in physical and social pain (i.e. social rejection) are processed in the anterior PLoS ONE | www.plosone.org 1 April 2011 | Volume 6 | Issue 4 | e18675 Your Flaws Are My Pain insula [19]. Based on these studies, the ACC and the anterior empirical studies on vicarious embarrassment; however, it has not insula have been regarded as core regions involved in empathically yet been integrated into a conceptualization of situations eliciting processing the emotions of others and generating inner states of vicarious embarrassment. another person’s feelings [20]. The above considerations led us to organize situations in which While concentrating on basic emotions, social neuroscience has vicarious embarrassment may occur along two dimensions. The not yet focused on the neural correlates of vicarious embarrass- dimension of ‘‘intentionality’’ represents the accidental versus ment experienced for others’ flaws. However, some fMRI studies intentional character of the embarrassing situation. The dimension have investigated related concepts, such as the first-person of ‘‘awareness’’ refers to the accessibility of the norm violation to the experience of embarrassment [21] or the impact of intentional observed protagonist. The dimensions are thought to be and accidental norm violations on inferred emotions using written conceptually orthogonal, so their combination results in four vignettes [22,23]. These studies asked participants to infer their distinctive classes of situations in which observers may experience own emotions imagining being the protagonist or estimating the vicarious embarrassment, abbreviated in the following as (i) AA emotion of the protagonist, respectively. These studies are thus (accidental > aware); (ii) AU (accidental > unaware); (iii) IA limited in understanding the processes involved in vicarious (intentional > aware) and (iv) IU (intentional > unaware). embarrassment experiences.In line with the model of Miller (1987), we hypothesize that empathy processes provide the Overview of the Present Studies foundation to understand the complex emotion of vicarious The present research aims to elucidate the phenomenon of embarrassment and postulate that individual differences in vicarious embarrassment, its link to individual differences in trait empathy modulate the embarrassment individuals experience for empathy, and the underlying neuro-cognitive processes. In two others’ predicaments. Therefore, the observation of vicariously pilot studies, we constructed and validated stimulus situations to embarrassing situations should not only stimulate brain regions elicit vicarious embarrassment representing the hypothesized typically involved in empathic processes, but moreover individual dimensions of ‘‘intentionality’’ and ‘‘awareness’’ (see File S1). In differences in trait empathy should correlate with these neural Study 1, we showed that vicarious embarrassment is experienced activations. independently of the experience of first-person embarrassment and that vicarious embarrassment is related to individual differences in Modeling Intention Attribution and Perspective Taking in trait empathy. In Study 2, we used functional magnetic resonance Vicarious Embarrassment imaging (fMRI) to transfer this modulation of individual Previously used experimental procedures limit the examination differences in trait empathy to the level of neural activations of vicarious embarrassment experiences to situations that engage during the processing of vicariously embarrassing situations. We protagonists who are aware about their current transgression [6]. discuss these findings in the light of contemporary research on To better approximate the broader variety of situations that make empathy for physical pain. observers experience vicarious embarrassment we propose a different