Abstract

The experience of embarrassment was explored in two experiments comparingmonolingual and bilingual speakers from cultures varying in the degree of elabo-ration of the embarrassment lexicon. In Experiment 1, narratives in English orKorean depicting three types of embarrassing predicaments were to be rated ontheir embarrassability and humorousness by Korean-English bilinguals, Koreanmonolinguals, and Euro-American monolinguals. All groups judged certainpredicaments (involving social gaffes) to be the most embarrassing. However,significant group and language differences occurred in judgments of the inten-sity of embarrassment and amusement judgments evoked. Euro-Americans ex-hibited higher overall levels of amusement than the two Korean groups who, inturn, reported higher levels of embarrassment, particularly for certain predica-ment types and contexts (ingroup members present). Further, for the bilinguals,inept performance predicaments in English were judged more embarrassingthan those in Korean, whereas all predicament types were judged more amusingwhen framed with English emotion labels. Bilinguals also appeared to show aheightened embarrassability relative to both monolingual groups. Experiment2 found lexical selection differences in open-ended responses to embarrassingpredicaments depicted in each language, with Euro-Americans preferring to givejustifications or use humor to minimize the embarrassment and Korean-Englishbilinguals preferring to give apologies or say nothing. The findings are interpret-ed to reflect the influence of culturally-mediated schemas guiding the activation and processing of emotion vocabulary.