Who is embarrassed by what?

We investigated some types of triggers of embarrassment and their personali ty correlates. A total of 161 undergraduates indicated how embarrassed they would be in a variety of situations classified a priori into three types. The types were based on the kind of trigger they embodied and were derived in part from current theories of embarrassment. Several analytic techniques , including factor analysis, suggested that there are at least three sorts of situations people find embarrassing: committing a faux pas, being the ce ntre of attention, and threatening another's social identity. We created a subscale for each subtype of trigger. Embarrassibility on each subscale was correlated with embarrassibility on the others, but the reliabilities of t he subscales substantially exceeded their intercorrelations. Some personali ty variables, for example, Neuroticism (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975) correlated with all subscales, whereas other personality variables correlated differe ntially, for example, Revised Self-Monitoring (Lennox & Wolf, 1984), Intera ction Anxiousness (Leary, 1983), and Rejection Sensitivity (Downey & Feldma n, 1996). We believe, contrary to previous suggestions (Edelmann & McCusker , 1986), that there are subtypes of triggers of embarrassment and they they roughly correspond to the different causes of embarrassment as proposed by various theorists. We discuss the implications of our results for theories of embarrassment.