Banishing the blush

Research from a psychology laboratory at Murdoch University is moving closer to banishing the crippling embarrassment experienced by people who find their cheeks permanently flushed.

Associate Professor Peter Drummond, a clinical psychologist whose research interests include mechanisms of chronic pain and anxiety, has made some inroads into explaining why people blush.

“Understanding blushing will give us a better concept of social anxiety and how to manage it,” Professsor Drummond said.

“There is quite a bit of anecdotal evidence that blushing can triggered by people staring directly at your skin. Charles Darwin believed that the face blushes more than other body parts because this is the section of skin that is most frequently seen. Another experimenter suggested that people were less likely to blush on stage if the audience wore sunglasses. So we decided to test these theories in a proper experimental manner.”

Professor Drummond compared the effects of staring at one side of the face when the subject was only 40 cm away and then from another room through a window.

“To our surprise we found that blood flow increased on the side of the face under scrutiny in both experiments,” Professor Drummond said.

“This could be an indication that blushing is part of a complex set of signals about our emotional experience. We believe that blushing demonstrates that you are feeling uncomfortable or are making a silent apology for some social transgression. This particular phenomenon of partial blushing could be a way of sending multiple social messages at the same time.”

Professor Drummond hopes to continue work in the area of blushing, examining the effects of different conversation topics and interpersonal styles.