- Author, Hafsa Khalil
- Role, BBC news
Have you ever wondered why your cheeks get red when all eyes are on you?
Blushing turns out to be a spontaneous emotional response, rather than the result of cognitive self-reflection, new research published Wednesday suggests.
In an attempt to induce blushing so they could investigate its cause, researchers at the University of Amsterdam asked a group of 16- to 20-year-old women to sing karaoke in front of a camera, then had them watch a playback of their performance. .
Milica Nikolić, a developmental psychologist from the university’s Institute for Child Development and Education and lead author of the study, has already investigated blushing as a physiological measure of young children’s emotions in social settings.
“I wondered what exactly triggers blushing—is it thinking about what other people think of us, or is it more of an automatic and spontaneous response to social exposure?” she asked.
This question presents two main theories about what causes blushing. The former proposes that complex cognitive processing such as self-reflection and self-awareness acts as a trigger, while the latter argues that blushing is a rapid and spontaneous emotional response.
To answer this question, Ms. Nikolić’s team placed people in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and induced flushing while measuring their brain activity.
The participants were a group of 40 late-life women—the age when there is “heightened sensitivity to social evaluation and self-awareness”—recruited from and around Amsterdam.
The study did not only focus on women, but the volunteers were women after all.
People with various social anxiety disorders were recruited based on the answers they provided in a questionnaire. When signing up for the study, volunteers were not told that they would be singing karaoke so as not to limit the type of people signing up.
Participants were first recorded renditions of four songs deliberately chosen for their difficulty to maximize embarrassment (and therefore blushing potential), including Let It Go by Disney Frozen and All I Want For Christmas Is You by Mariah Carey. Participants then watched a video of themselves singing and another of the professional singers they were told was another participant with similar singing abilities.
While watching the videos, the participants had their brain activity recorded to detect changes in blood flow in the brain. Their left cheek temperature was also continuously measured to assess their blushing.
Ms. Nikolić explained that the researchers had two ideas: Either blushing is caused by thinking about how others perceive us, which would activate brain regions involved in mentalizing, or it is caused by underlying processes such as emotional arousal and attention to a social situation.
To the researchers’ surprise, brain regions involved in mentalizing were not activated. Instead, they found that when participants blushed while watching their own performances, there was activity in areas of the brain involved in emotion.
This means that blushing is a spontaneous emotional response that comes from social exposure and does not require cognitive processing, the study said.
Ms Nikolić explained that blushing “can have important functions” and alert people that there is something relevant that could affect their social status.
Since only women participated in this study, it remains an open question whether men would respond in the same way, Ms. Nikolić said. Studies in adults show that women can be more embarrassed and blush more easily, she said.