Awkward

  I used to hate it when I blushed during times of embarrassment. It felt bad enough that I had committed an awkward act, but my blushing felt like a public acknowledgment of my awkwardness that made things worse. Matthew Feinberg and his colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley, conducted a series of studies to test the idea that embarrassment serves the social function of demonstrating to others that they hold prosocial values, which is to say that they care about the well-being of others and are generally motivated to avoid harming or inconveniencing others. Feinberg found that people who showed more embarrassment while recounting one of their most embarrassing moments were rated by others as more prosocial and more trustworthy. Importantly, observers reported that they would be more interested in affiliating with people who showed high levels of embarrassment compared to people who showed low levels of embarrassment. In other words, people who demonstrated embarrassment became more socially valued.

  Another emotion related to awkward feelings is guilt, which makes you feel bad about your behavior and motivates you to repair the social damage: to apologize, clean up a spill, or pay for something you have damaged. All of these responses to your social missteps help you assure others that you understand what you have done wrong, you feel remorseful, and you are taking action to make things right. Both embarrassment and guilt help us recover from awkward acts because they show others that we “get it.” That is, there are outward signs that we are aware that we have violated a social rule and we feel bad about any inconvenience to others.

  The problem is that awkward people do not always clearly understand which social expectation they have violated. Sometimes awkward people know their behavior is off base, but they are not sure exactly which social expectations need to be met. The function of feeling awkward is to alert us that social expectations are being violated and to get it together before we burn more social capital. But unlike embarrassment and guilt, which are responses to our knowledge of the specific expectation we have not met, awkwardness leaves us with no clear diagnosis of what is wrong.

  Until the person committing the awkward behavior shows embarrassment or acts with intent to fix the situation, others do not see any indication that the person is aware of her faux pas and its potential impact on others. Awkward people tend to be less emotionally expressive, which can make them appear unremorseful when they inconvenience others or hurt others’ feelings.

  Embarrassment signals remorse, guilt encourages behaviors that repair social damage, and awkwardness alerts someone to expectations being violated, but shame plummets one’s self-esteem to the point of immobilization, making it harder for people to admit their missteps or repair the effects of their behavior. People can find ways to cope with their feelings of awkwardness, but when someone starts to feel ashamed about their awkwardness, then it becomes tough to find a way forward. Although emotions are reflexive, people can have some choice about whether they choose to reframe their response to an awkward moment. I have found that people can benefit from simply asking themselves, “Does this mistake mean that I’m a bad person or just someone who made a mistake?”

  If one becomes accustomed to accurately seeing fleeting social missteps for what they are and not an indication of one’s overall worth as a person, then there is a chance that one will begin to reflexively respond with more adaptive emotions. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, something as small as saying you’re sorry with a quick blush can be enough to spark a graceful response from others even during our most awkward moments.

  THE MEANING OF SIX EMOTIONS AND HOW TO RESPOND

  EMOTION

  WHAT IT MEANS

  WAYS TO RESPOND

  Anger

  This was unfair.

  Apologize if it’s you, clarify if it’s a misunderstanding, say, “I’m sorry, that’s unfair,” if someone else is responsible.

  Distress

  This is going downhill.

  Mirror their emotional state, express your concern or willingness to help.

  Embarrassment

  That was inappropriate.

  It depends . . . sometimes you can minimize the event, “It’s not a big deal,” other times you can commiserate, “I did that before.”

  Joy

  This went way better than expected.

  Do not temper the mood, just go along with being happy.

  Pride

  This achievement was important to me.

  Do not say anything that starts with, “Yes, but . . .” Simply say, “I’m happy for you.”

  Hope

  This is bad, but it could get better.

  Do not try to suggest that contrary to what they hope, things will continue to go poorly or get worse.

  Broadening a Narrow Focus

  ELLIE’S PARENTS HOPED that I could help her gain some control over her emotional life and help her express her displeasure with emotions that were more socially acceptable. Ellie’s parents knew that her temper tantrums scared other kids and eventually other kids’ fear of Ellie’s explosive potential would make them leery about befriending her. Whether they’re experiencing depression, anxiety, or anger, clients usually hope that therapists can help them decrease their negative emotions. But what happens when psychologists see therapy not only as a way to decrease negative outcomes, but also as an opportunity to help people leverage the functional nature of emotions to facilitate positive outcomes?

  Ellie’s aloofness and disarming cuteness made her a covert form of awkward, but her spotlighted attention and emotional dysregulation were among many of her quintessentially awkward qualities. Her intense focus on how to render drawings allowed her to appreciate form, shape, and color in ways that most adults will never know. She did things that most people never learn to do, such as draw portraits with her subjects standing at pleasing and meaningful angles or drawing clothing with rich texture that gave her subjects depth. But her spotlighted attention on form made it easy for her to lose sight of the bigger picture, and her intense energy while pursuing something she wanted made it easy for her to launch into a tirade when her expectations were not met.

  Ellie and I worked to improve her identification of emotions and managing those emotions, but I also had a hunch that we could leverage positive emotions to broaden her attention to the bigger picture in social situations, namely her impact on others when she went on a tirade. Positive emotions also have adaptive functions, but they are very different from the fight-or-flight responses associated with negative emotions.

  Emotion researchers like Alice Isen at Cornell University and Barbara Frederickson at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have found that positive emotions do more than just create a pleasant feeling. Professor Frederickson’s broaden-and-build theory of emotions suggests that positive emotions facilitate more expansive thought processes, make us more likely to notice atypical pieces of information, and allow us to hold more information in our conscious mind. This broadened thought process and availability of more information give us an opportunity to see creative solutions because the number of possible combinations grows exponentially with each additional piece of information we notice or hold in our mind. These creative insights can help us achieve professional outcomes that build financial or political resources, but they can also help us see new ways of handling complex social conundrums that build our social capital.

  In this way, positive emotions can broaden the awkward person’s tendency to remain narrowly focused. For awkward people whose creative potential relies upon their ability to put together information in a unique way, positive emotions can be a catalyst to bring together disparate ideas into unusual combinations, which is one of the hallmarks of innovative thinking.

  Although there are exceptions to the rule, the best odds for achieving creative breakthroughs happen to people who figure out how to be the opposite of the tortured artist. This data paints a picture of people who are grateful for their specific talent, mindful of their limitations, driven to better themselves, and their af
fable nature builds social resources that help them feel a sense of belonging.

  Evidence for the long-term benefits of positive emotion comes from a study by LeeAnne Harker and Dacher Keltner at the University of California at Berkeley, who conducted a fascinating study of positive emotional dispositions and social outcomes. They looked at data from the thirty-year Mills Longitudinal Study of one hundred women who graduated from Mills College in 1958 and 1960. Harker and Keltner applied a clever methodology to answer a relatively straightforward question: Would women who smiled in their yearbook photos have different social outcomes during their lifetimes from women who did not smile?

  How could a seemingly insignificant act of smiling in a college yearbook photo be predictive of so many important life outcomes? There is no reason to smile in a photo with a photographer you will meet for one minute and probably never see again, yet some people sat on an uncomfortable stool, in front of an earth-tone tie-dyed backdrop, and flashed a genuine smile for the photo. They were probably the same people who smiled while shoveling snow or who sat in rush hour singing along in their car with a smile. They did not need a reason to be cheerful; it was in their dispositional nature to be cheerful. People who are disposed to being cheerful are strange in their own way, but their enthusiastic weirdness is magnetic and energizing, and people cannot help but feel deep down that they want to shovel snow or sing along in the car with these cheerful souls.

  What Harker and Keltner found was that compared to women who were not smiling in their yearbook photos, women who smiled were more likely to report more positive emotions, lower negative emotions, more pleasant interpersonal behaviors, and more competency (e.g., productive, responsible). These associations held decades later, when the women were assessed at age forty-three and fifty-two. Women who were smiling in their yearbook photos were still higher in dispositional positive emotion, lower in dispositional negative emotion, and scored higher on measures of occupational competence. They were also more likely to be married and to be satisfied in their marriages.

  These findings suggest that when people become narrowly focused on ameliorating the negative they can miss a key foothold. Positive emotions can do more than just get us out of a negative emotional rut. They have the potential to facilitate new insights that can help one see new ways of approaching social situations and build durable social resources. Although awkward people are prone to appearing aloof to others, they are also capable of joy and enthusiasm for the things they love. Positive emotions may be particularly useful for awkward individuals because they could broaden their spotlighted focus and allow them to see a broader perspective.

  The data we have reviewed in this chapter suggest that awkward people are prone to appearing aloof, but we have also seen that this may be because they perceive their world so intensely that they become leery of being overwhelmed by their capability to manage intense emotions. For someone like Ellie who could easily lose control of her temper, her expression of unbridled negative emotions was a punishing experience that began to make her fearful of her general capacity for emotions. But awkward people can also become apprehensive about expressing positive emotions. When they gush with enthusiasm and joy about their achievements at the highest level of a video game or explain at great length their fascination with an unsolved mathematical proof, they can get social feedback that makes them feel as if their intuition about when to feel joyful is wrong.

  I knew that I needed to have a sense of urgency about helping Ellie get a handle on her temper tantrums, but what made me feel a profound sense of fear and sadness was that she was also at risk for tamping down all of her emotions, including her wondrous joy about a world that she already saw differently from most people. What I eventually learned was that well-intended adults were constantly telling Ellie to stop doodling, pay attention, or hurry up. The adults in Ellie’s life kept telling her to stay on task.

  Ellie was paying attention and she was very task oriented, but her spotlighted attention was drawn to unusual things and this led her to choose to solve intangible tasks, which took the form of artistic renderings or wildly creative fictions. Even at her young age she was already more interested in drawing new boundaries than coloring inside the lines, and she preferred imagining new stories of what could be rather than recitations of the same old tales.

  Figure 4.1 What can you do to boost your positive emotions? In an experience-sampling study that tracked changes in moods based on people’s daily activities, Csikszentmihalyi and Wong found that games, socializing, and eating were the activities associated with boosts in positive emotions. They also found that activities done with other people were consistently associated with more positive emotions.

  What Ellie and I eventually discovered was that her temper tantrums occurred when she was lost in her rich imagination. When adults barked at her to eat some more of her dinner or unexpectedly pulled away her sketch pad, she felt sharply annoyed. I explained to her parents that it would be like someone talking during a critical scene in a movie or someone interrupting them during an important call. It’s understandable that Ellie may have felt frustrated in those interruptions, but she needed to learn how to express why she was frustrated instead of launching into temper tantrums.

  Why Are You Making That Face?

  WHEN I OPENED the door to the waiting room, I found Ellie standing right in front of the door. She had been waiting for three days to get an answer to her unanswered question, “Ty. Did you find out what your angry face looks like?”

  During the three days between my appointments with Ellie, I casually asked every friend I saw two questions: First, do I have an angry face, and second, what does it look like? Although I am easily prone to some negative emotions such as frustration or anxiety, I have always been unusually slow to anger, which made it difficult for me to recall specific instances when I felt angry. While most people could not recall seeing me angry, the two people I asked who knew me best reported that there was indeed an angry face.

  My girlfriend said, “Your angry face is not so much angry, but dismayed.” Instead of my eyes narrowing, they grew wide and jumped around, as if physically searching for an answer as to why the other person decided that it was a good idea to do something so upsetting to me. My lips did not purse, but rather my mouth fell agape, which conveyed a sense of disbelief. My cousin told me that others probably perceived my facial expression as “more dumbfounded than upset.” I also learned my upset was made worse by the fact that I never vocalized an explanation for why I was upset, but rather moved on to another topic, as if the moment never happened.

  I made my angry face for Ellie. She gave me a quizzical glance. Then I made my self-conscious face. Ellie was aware that she was far from being an emotional expert, but she knew that there was something odd about my angry face. She flashed her emotional intelligence potential when she delivered surprisingly diplomatic feedback, “That’s not a very good angry face. But you have a good smiley face.”

  We went back to my office, where we sat on the floor and casually doodled with crayons on an oversized sketch pad. I asked Ellie if she had any temper tantrums since I last saw her. As she told me about her three temper tantrums over the past three days, her gaze turned downward, her posture slumped, and before the last ounce of cheerfulness escaped I suggested a positive take. Even though she had not changed her temper tantrums, at least she could start to identify her emotions.

  Awkward people eventually become aware that they have trouble naturally picking up on signals that someone else is distressed, but in other situations they might feel their anger rise in response to nonthreatening circumstances. This puts awkward people in the counterintuitive position of needing to do something other than what their emotional reactions dictate. Awkward people figure out that sometimes they need to use a secondary response that follows the logic: If situation A, then I feel B, but most people feel C, so I should react as if I were feeling C instead of B.

  It’s a tough bind because it highligh
ts the ongoing question of being true to yourself versus the motivation to improve your ability to meet social expectations.

  Most people cannot feign embarrassment by blushing on command and you cannot take action to remedy a social transgression when you cannot identify how you have deviated from what was socially expected. A functional way for awkward people to handle a mismatch between their natural emotional reaction and the expected emotional reaction is to verbalize the message that is not being communicated through their expressions by saying something like, “I’m sorry, I probably should have handled that differently” or “I hope I did not offend, I think I’m having a hard time saying exactly what I mean.” It’s an imperfect solution, but these kinds of phrases following a social transgression allow the awkward person to convey three important things that are likely missing from their emotional response: I didn’t act with bad intent, I’m sorry, and I would like to fix it.

  There are things that awkward people can do to mitigate the effects of uncomfortable emotions, but it’s interesting to consider whether awkward people’s lack of emotionality in some circumstances and intense emotionality in other situations might serve a purpose. Maybe awkward people’s emotional lives should not be looked at as dysfunctional, but rather as different and potentially adaptive in some situations.

  When one stops to think about the high probability of failure in ventures such as start-ups (90 percent within five years), restaurants (60 percent during the first three years), or the repeated failures in scientific endeavors, the vicarious anxiety alone can be enough to dissuade someone from ever getting involved. What kind of a person is all right with taking on enormous tasks that are more likely to fail than succeed, and what kind of person does not implode during the weekly failures in these types of ventures?