Why do we get embarrassed?

THAT'S THE WHY:Cringe! You hear a playback of your enthusiastic karaoke singing last night – you know, when you were channelling Freddie Mercury in full flight. It's not quite so plausible the morning after.

Or maybe you are at a wedding and you see one of the bridesmaids walking up the aisle with toilet paper stuck to her shoe. Mortifying.

Why do we feel embarrassed, either for ourselves or for other people? It’s a complex social reaction, but research highlights areas of our brains that may be involved in those winces.

In one recent experiment, researchers at the University of California asked 79 people, many of whom had neurodegenerative disease, to sing the 1964 Temptations hit My Girl in karaoke and gauged their reactions when it was played back to them without the acccompanying music.

Measurements of their physiological reactions to hearing themselves, coupled with structural mapping of their brains, showed that people with substantial degeneration in an area called the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex were less likely to be embarrassed.

The researchers presented the results at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology earlier this month.

But what about feeling scarlet for others? A Public Library of Science ONE paper out this month called Your Flaws Are My Pain: Linking Empathy To Vicarious Embarrassment helps shed some light on what goes on inside our heads there.

Using functional MRI, the researchers found that the anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula in our brains “are strongly implicated in experiencing the ‘social pain’ for others flaws and pratfalls”.