Not Here, Not Now! Situational Appropriateness, Negative Affect and the Experience of (Remote) Embarrassment. A Process Model. Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der Fakultät für Humanwissenschaften der Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. Vorgelegt von Paul Sebastian Álvarez Loeblich aus Würzburg. Würzburg, 2017 Erstgutachter: Prof. Dr. Fritz Strack Zweitgutachter: Prof. Dr. Andreas Eder Tag des Kolloquiums: 23.4.2018 Widmung A la familia, Potato. Wildling. Fritz’ Geduld, Ritas können, Andreas’ Motivation. Meiner neuen Heimat. Kaffee. TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS ..............................................................................................................I THEORETICAL PART ...............................................................................................................4 General Introduction ....................................................................................................................4 The Lack of a Process Model of Embarrassment ....................................................................................................4 Embarrassment .............................................................................................................................6 Shame ........................................................................................................................................................................7 Understanding Embarrassment ................................................................................................................................8 Theories of Embarrassment....................................................................................................................................... 11 Understanding Embarrassment at a Process Level ..................................................................................................13 Fremdschämen and Embarrassment 13 Embarrassment antecedents: expectancy violation, negative affect and cultural scripts 16 A Cultural-Interactional Process Model of Embarrassment ....................................................................................20 What About Fremdschämen? 25 Embarrassment: A Procedural Definition ................................................................................................................26 Overview of the Present Research and Outlook on the Experiments ................................28 EMPIRICAL PART .....................................................................................................................30 Study 1: Defining Fremdschämen ..............................................................................................30 Design........................................................................................................................................................................ 30 Method .....................................................................................................................................................................30 Results .......................................................................................................................................................................32 Discussion .................................................................................................................................................................38 I TABLE OF CONTENTS Experiment 1: Effect of Regulatory Focus on the Experience of Positive and Negative Af- fect and Activation in a Typical Fremdscham Situation ......................................................40 Hypotheses ................................................................................................................................................................42 Method .....................................................................................................................................................................43 Procedure 43 Materials 44 Results .......................................................................................................................................................................49 Discussion .................................................................................................................................................................52 Experiment 2: Experiential Fremdscham and Context Dependability ...............................55 Hypotheses ................................................................................................................................................................56 Method .....................................................................................................................................................................57 Procedure 57 Materials 59 Results .......................................................................................................................................................................63 Discussion .................................................................................................................................................................70 Experiment 3: Generalisability of Experiential Fremdscham ..............................................73 Hypotheses ................................................................................................................................................................74 Method .....................................................................................................................................................................74 Procedure 75 Materials 75 Results .......................................................................................................................................................................78 Discussion .................................................................................................................................................................81 GENERAL DISCUSSION ...........................................................................................................84 A New Theory for Embarrassment: The Cultural-Interactional Process Model of Embarrassment....................... 86 Detecting the Issue 86 Reacting to the Issue 88 And a New Matching Definition.............................................................................................................................. 88 II TABLE OF CONTENTS Some Empirical Evidence ........................................................................................................................................89 Last Remarks ............................................................................................................................................................94 BIBLIOGRAPHY .........................................................................................................................95 APPENDIX ....................................................................................................................................108 III THEORETICAL PART General Introduction Fremdschämen or Fremdscham, a negative emotion which arises while observing someone behave in- appropriately, comes to fame after the turn of the millennium in german speaking countries. There, they name it literally „other‘s shame“ and it becomes obvious that this emotion happens most commonly while watching TV: reality shows, talent shows and bad comedies. The word even makes it to the dictionaries starting 2009 (p. 453, Scholze-Stubenrecht), as its use increases un- stoppably in everyday language, starting to get used in more and more situations, seemingly as a synonym of embarrassing or shameful. Still, a look in the emotional research on the subject returns exactly zero results as of 2011, leaving open the question as of what this emotion might be, and what it is not. The Lack of a Process Model of Embarrassment First exploratory studies suggest that fremdscham is essentially embarrassment and is only linguist- ically related to shame (Study 1 and Experiment 1). Since the differentiation between Shame and Embarrassment has been treated elsewhere and there seems to be little doubt concerning their con- ceptual differences (Tangney, Miller, Flicker, & Barlow, 1996), the present work will only briefly address the very well studied emotion of Shame, and only as needed to clarify that there is no ne- cessity to disentangle both any further. Sadly, on the other hand embarrassment research is until now, at best, of descriptive character. Even highly respected treaties on the subject, like Miller’s seminal work Embarrassment: Poise and peril in everyday life (Rowland S. Miller, 1996), which is the most relied on source of information on the subject, presents only old —if interesting and useful— heuristic theories as the best explanations available. Essentially, every aspect of the process lead- ing to and influencing the experience of embarrassment has not been studied in a scientific way, thus remaining fremdscham, and surprisingly embarrassment, without an explanation and in need of a theoretical framework from which to develop experimental research. 4 Theoretical Part Thus, the present work aims to resolve some of this deficits. I will here propose a theoretical framework, based on well researched models of emotion and cognition, which will be able to ex- plain both Embarrassment and Fremdschämen in a satisfactory, experimentally useful way and will provide a much needed basis for defining