You've just committed the greatest faux pas in the history of Western civilization.
At a state dinner at the White House you suddenly realize, too late, that the bowl of rose water placed before you between courses was meant for finger washing, not sipping. Midslurp, you slowly lower your soup spoon.As the other guests recoil in horror, you want more than anything to disappear, to become invisible. But instead you feel the opposite happening. A warm tingle envelops your face and you feel your cheeks and forehead turning a deep, attention-getting shade of red.
The harder you try to stop it, the worse it gets - until your face feels as if it is on fire, glowing as brightly as a charcoal briquette in a backyard barbecue.
At this point it is probably no comfort to reflect on Mark Twain's classic observation: "Man is the only animal who blushes - or needs to."
But now new theories are emerging to explain the unique physiological phenomenon.
By studying why we blush, researchers say, we can gain a valuable window into the complex and puzzling relationships between our minds, bodies and society.
Twain was right; no other animals blush. It is among the few physiological changes triggered directly by the mind. It appears to be genetically hard-wired, rather than learned; even people who have been blind since birth blush. And it is a social phenomenon. Hardly anyone blushes in private.
According to a new theory, we blush as an instinctive way to get back in the good graces of others, to avoid being ostracized from a group for breaching the unwritten rules of society.
"We do it when we've done something that threatens our status in a group - when we've done something deviant, when we've been caught with our hand in the cookie jar," said Mark Leary, a Wake Forest University social psychologist who presented his theory recently at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association.
Blushing, said Leary, is an "appeasement behavior" to defuse a potentially ugly situation. Most animals, he said, have ways of doing this.
"When primates are threatened by a dominant animal, they lower their eyes and get this really cheesy grin on their faces," he said. "Sometimes they present their rear ends. It defuses the likelihood that they will lose status in the group or suffer aggression."
Leary said he noticed that same "cheesy grin" on the faces of people who were blushing.
"Blushing causes other people to back off," he said. "If someone is blushing, you tend to be easier on them than if they're not. It's a non-verbal apology - a way to say you realize you made a mistake and you're sorry."
And there is solid evidence that it works - or at least that blushing has a measurable, physical effect on others in the group.
Rowland Miller, a psychologist at Sam Houston State University in Texas, has found changes in the galvanic skin responses of people who watch others embarrass themselves.
Miller wired up test participants and had them sit behind one-way mirrors and watch as people humiliated themselves by trying to sing the national anthem or dance to Al Jarreau music.
Changes in the electrical conductivity of the observers' skin showed that they were undergoing a strong emotional response. Later, in interviews, the observers reported being embarrassed themselves.
"The audience is made to feel the same way" as the person who embarrassed himself, Miller said. "It causes everyone to work together and move on from there - because embarrassment is not a lot of fun for the audience, either. Everyone's happy to get past it."
No one is absolutely certain why only humans blush. But along the way researchers have learned a few other things about blushing:
-You can make someone blush merely by accusing them of doing it.
"If you tell a person they're starting to blush, chances are they will," Leary said. "That's how we get people to blush when we're doing experiments. Try it - it usually works."
-It's all but impossible to make yourself blush. When chronic blushers feel one coming on, they are coached to try to make themselves turn as red as possible. In many cases, they stop blushing completely.
Leary and Miller aren't the first scientists to study blushing. For more than a century, it has attracted the attention of some of the greatest minds in Western thought. Darwin, Freud, Sartre and others developed theories about it that mirrored their particular view of the world.
Evolutionist Charles Darwin devoted an entire chapter to blushing in his book, "The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals." He was the first to note that it is unique to humans, yet universal among its races and cultures.
Blushing may be an inherited trait, he suggested, since even people who have been blind since birth do it. Darwin wrote that blushing was triggered by the attention of others:
"It is not the simple act of reflecting on our own appearance, but the thinking what others think of us which excites the blush."
Existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre believed you blush when you become aware of the alienation of your body - in other words, when you realize you are distinct from your physical being. Blushing, he suggested, comes from the recognition of someone else's view of your body.
Freudian psychoanalysts have written reams about blushing, which they believe is a complex reaction involving your fear of castration, repressed libidinal excitement and a subconscious power struggle between your id and superego.
Your face turns red, they say, because of repressed sexual excitement. Psychologist S. Feldman put it this way: "Men blush because they feel castrated, and women blush because they are not men."
Today's researchers view things in far simpler terms.
"I think what I've realized" about blushing, Leary said, "is that so much of our behavior occurs within the constraints of just trying not to look like an idiot."
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service