USC Aiken Professor Gets Honest Read on Facial Blushing

Aiken, SC (09/30/2019) — The online journal, Cognition and Emotion, recently published a study conducted by Dr. Adam Pazda, a psychology professor at the University of South Carolina Aiken.

Fellow researchers from Rochester, NY and the United Kingdom teamed up with Pazda on the study: "Facial blushing influences perceived embarrassment and related social functional evaluations." This line of research investigates how facial coloration can convey information about people's emotional states.

"Perceiving emotions of others can be quite easy sometimes. We can look at their facial expression and body language, which can be very informative," Pazda said.

"However, people are also really good at faking an emotion expression. For instance, you can say something that makes me really angry, and I can keep a straight face."

He says that it is much harder to control what a person's underlying physiology is doing, specifically when it increases oxygenated blood flow to the face.

"So, facial color can be an 'honest' signal of someone's emotional state even when they are trying to disguise or hide a facial expression," Pazda added.

One specific instance in which someone might try to fake an emotion is when asking for forgiveness after committing a social transgression. The Aiken-based researcher, originally from Houston, says it's easy for someone to bow their head down and say they're sorry, even if they don't really mean it.

"So how do you really know if someone is authentically sorry? Facial color can give us some clues," Pazda said.

Experiencing embarrassment and shame is typically accompanied by a blushing response in the face. He says that while anyone can fake a facial expression, it's almost impossible to fake a blushing response.

"This means that people can use facial color information to more accurately decode whether someone is truly sorry - and worthy of forgiveness - after doing some social harm," according to Pazda.

He says that the key takeaway from the data in this study is that facial redness on a person leads to stronger perceptions of embarrassment, stronger perceptions of apology sincerity, and a higher likelihood of forgiving someone for a social transgression. This is even the case when the person in question is displaying facial expressions associated with shame and embarrassment.

"In other words, we use color to interpret emotions over and above what facial expressions tell us about emotions," said Pazda, who is fascinated with the psychology of color.

"We typically think of color as just something that is aesthetically pleasing without realizing it can have a large impact on how we perceive other people."

Pazda earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Houston and his doctorate from the University of Rochester. To date, he has published 20 peer-reviewed journal articles, all of which investigate some aspect of how color and psychology are related.

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