Susceptibility to Embarrassment Scale

Abstract

The Susceptibility to Embarrassment Scale (SES), developed by psychometricians Kevin M. Kelly and Warren H. Jones in 1997, is an empirically validated self-report instrument designed to quantify individual differences in dispositional embarrassability. Dispositional embarrassability refers to a stable personality trait characterized by the chronic tendency to experience self-conscious discomfort, acute fluster, and mortification in response to perceived social blunders, unwanted attention, or real or imagined public scrutiny. Comprising 25 items assessed via a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (“not at all like me”) to 7 (“very much like me”), the SES captures cognitive, affective, and somatic aspects of self-evaluative distress. Psychometric evaluations across diverse adolescent, collegiate, and adult cohorts demonstrate exceptional internal consistency, with Cronbach's alpha coefficients consistently falling between .90 and .93, alongside robust test-retest reliability across multi-week intervals (r = .84 to .88). Construct validity is well-established through strong positive associations with public self-consciousness, fear of negative evaluation, social anxiety, and neuroticism, paired with negative correlations with self-esteem and social confidence. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses generally corroborate a primary general factor of dispositional embarrassability while elucidating distinct facets such as fear of public mistakes, center-of-attention discomfort, physical vulnerability/appearance concern, and somatic responsiveness (e.g., blushing). The SES serves as a prominent metric within social psychology, clinical assessment, and behavioral research, elucidating how concerns regarding self-presentation, social evaluation, and interpersonal threat impact everyday functioning, avoidance behaviors, and subjective well-being.

Keywords

Susceptibility to Embarrassment Scale, embarrassability, social anxiety, self-conscious emotions, impression management, public self-consciousness, fear of negative evaluation, social blunders, psychometrics, self-presentation

Authors

The Susceptibility to Embarrassment Scale was formulated by Kevin M. Kelly and Warren H. Jones. At the time of the scale's conceptualization and primary empirical validation, both researchers were affiliated with the Department of Psychology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, United States. Dr. Warren H. Jones is recognized for his seminal contributions to the study of interpersonal relations, loneliness, shyness, betrayal, and social emotions, having authored dozens of standardized psychological assessment batteries. Dr. Kevin M. Kelly has conducted fundamental research on social anxiety, dispositional embarrassability, and defensive social strategies. Additional large-scale structural validation and psychometric replication studies were later conducted by prominent personality researchers including John Maltby and Liz Day (affiliated with the University of Leicester and Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom), as well as evaluations by Mark R. Leary and colleagues at Duke University.

Purpose

The fundamental purpose of the Susceptibility to Embarrassment Scale is to provide researchers and clinical practitioners with a standardized, reliable, and nuanced instrument for measuring dispositional embarrassability as an enduring personality dimension. While almost all human beings experience transient embarrassment during social mishaps, individuals exhibit vast differences in their baseline vulnerability, latency of affective onset, subjective intensity, and post-event rumination. The SES was developed to overcome the psychometric and theoretical limitations of earlier instruments (such as the Modigliani Embarrassability Scale), which often conflated the subjective vulnerability to embarrassment with broad shyness, generalized social withdrawal, or specific situational phobias.

In research contexts, the SES enables investigators to explore the psychological mechanisms underpinning self-presentational distress, behavioral self-handicapping, stage fright, communication apprehension, and consumer avoidance (such as reluctance to purchase sensitive healthcare products). In clinical psychology and psychiatry, the scale assists clinicians in mapping the differential phenomenology of social anxiety disorder (SAD), avoidant personality patterns, body dysmorphic concerns, and depressive vulnerability. Because excessive fear of humiliation and mortification acts as a core transdiagnostic driver of behavioral avoidance, identifying high levels of dispositional embarrassability provides valuable targets for cognitive-behavioral restructuring, exposure protocols, and social skills rehabilitation.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the SES is dispositional embarrassability. Embarrassment belongs to the family of self-conscious, moral-evaluative emotions alongside shame, guilt, and social pride. However, embarrassability is conceptually distinct across several cognitive, physiological, and interpersonal parameters:

• Acute Public Self-Awareness: Embarrassment occurs when an unexpected event threatens an individual's projected social persona or public identity. Unlike guilt (which focuses on moral transgressions against an internal standard) or shame (which entails a profound, global devaluation of the core self), embarrassment stems primarily from interactive, public blunders, clumsiness, or sudden exposure to social attention.
• Center-of-Attention Discomfort: The construct encompasses marked distress when becoming the focal point of a collective audience, even in the absence of an explicit social error. Highly embarrassable individuals perceive the spotlight effect acutely, feeling psychologically naked, scrutinized, and transparent.
• Physical and Appearance Vulnerability: The construct features an amplified concern regarding one's physical grooming, attire, posture, and facial composure. Deviations from an ideal presentation are perceived as impending sources of social catastrophe or mockery.
• Somatic and Expressive Reactivity: Subjective embarrassability is intrinsically linked to autonomic arousal, notably facial blushing, sweating, tremors, and speech disfluencies. This creates a reciprocal positive feedback loop: the awareness of visible physiological arousal (e.g., blushing) exacerbates the perceived loss of composure, fueling further humiliation.

Theoretical Framework

The Susceptibility to Embarrassment Scale is grounded in modern social-psychological and sociological models of human interaction, drawing significantly from three theoretical traditions:

1. Goffman's Dramaturgical Model of Social Interaction

Sociologist Erving Goffman posited in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) that social reality is maintained through reciprocal theatrical performances where actors claim certain social identities (“fronts”). When an actor commits a faux pas, trips, misspeaks, or reveals inconsistent information, the shared definition of the situation collapses. Embarrassment serves as an acute, involuntary physiological acknowledgment of this expressive failure, signaling to the audience that the actor possesses social awareness and apologizes for the disturbance. Kelly and Jones operationalized embarrassability as individual susceptibility to the perceived collapse of these dramaturgical presentations.

2. Impression Management and Self-Presentation Theory

Building upon the work of Barry Schlenker and Mark R. Leary, impression management theory asserts that humans possess an evolutionary need to curate favorable evaluations in the minds of significant others to secure social capital, affiliation, and mating opportunities. Embarrassment arises when an event threatens to communicate undesirable social qualities (e.g., incompetence, clumsiness, low status). Individuals with elevated SES scores maintain rigid, perfectionistic self-presentational standards coupled with low perceived self-efficacy in managing unexpected social disruptions.

3. Sociometer Theory and Social Exclusion

Formulated by Leary, sociometer theory posits that self-conscious emotions function as an evolutionary warning mechanism monitoring social inclusion and exclusion. Embarrassment functions as a rapid-response system alerting the organism that social acceptance is jeopardized. The nonverbal displays associated with embarrassment (gaze aversion, nervous smile, downward head tilt, blushing) function as appeasement displays that defuse interpersonal aggression and invite empathy from onlookers.

Validity

The construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity of the SES have been rigorously substantiated across numerous independent investigations:

• Convergent Validity: The SES demonstrates moderate-to-strong positive correlations with established measures of social evaluative distress. Kelly and Jones (1997) reported substantial correlations with the Brief Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale (BFNE; r = .58 to .65), the Interaction Anxiousness Scale (IAS; r = .52 to .61), and the Public Self-Consciousness Scale (r = .46 to .54). It also correlates positively with the Neuroticism domain of the NEO Personality Inventory (r ≈ .45 to .52).
• Discriminant Validity: The SES successfully distinguishes between embarrassment, generalized guilt, and internal depression. Correlations with scales measuring private self-consciousness, generalized depression, and private guilt (e.g., TOSCA) are modest (typically r < .30), showing that the SES captures situational social vulnerability rather than global moral failure or non-social dysphoria.
• Criterion and Behavioral Validity: In behavioral laboratory paradigms, participants scoring high on the SES exhibit faster onset and greater duration of facial blushing (measured by photoplethysmography and skin temperature sensors) when viewing video recordings of themselves singing or when exposed to social blunders staged by experimenters. High scorers also demonstrate elevated heart rate reactivity and marked behavioral avoidance in public-speaking challenges.

Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the SES is exceptionally strong across multiple populations and languages:

• Internal Consistency: In their original scale development studies involving multiple independent collegiate samples (total N > 1,200), Kelly and Jones (1997) reported overall Cronbach's alpha coefficients between .90 and .93. Subsequent psychometric evaluations by Maltby and Day (2000) among a community sample of 310 British adults confirmed an internal reliability coefficient of α = .92. Subscale analyses consistently yield alpha values exceeding .80.
• Test-Retest Stability: Temporal stability assessments across an 8-week test-retest window yielded an intraclass correlation coefficient of r = .84 (Kelly & Jones, 1997), indicating that while subjective embarrassment is an acute situational state, the susceptibility to experiencing it is an enduring dispositional trait.
• Split-Half Reliability: Guttman split-half and Spearman-Brown reliability coefficients regularly exceed .88, confirming structural stability across both halves of the instrument.

Factor Analysis

The latent structure of the 25-item SES has been evaluated through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA):

Initial Unidimensional vs. Multi-Facet Models

Kelly and Jones (1997) initially established the SES as a predominantly unidimensional inventory, with a scree plot demonstrating a dominant first eigenvalue accounting for over 38% of the total variance. Factor loadings for the vast majority of items ranged from .45 to .78 on this primary general factor.

Multi-Dimensional Sub-Structure (Maltby & Day, 2000)

Subsequent psychometric examination using principal components analysis with varimax and oblimin rotations revealed four coherent, correlated sub-dimensions embedded within the overarching construct:

1. Public Performance / Center-of-Attention Anxiety: Characterized by items such as Item 4 (“I don't mind being the center of attention” – reverse), Item 11 (“I get flustered when speaking in front of a group”), Item 13 (“It is unsettling to be the center of attention”), and Item 14 (“I get tense just thinking about making a presentation by myself”). Loadings range from .62 to .81.
2. Social Inadequacy and Clumsiness: Encompasses feelings of unworthiness, social clumsiness, and conversational ineptitude, including Item 1 (“I feel unsure of myself”), Item 6 (“I feel inadequate when I am talking to someone I just met”), and Item 7 (“I feel clumsy in social situations”). Loadings range from .55 to .74.
3. Fear of Negative Evaluation and Blunders: Captures extreme distress over mistakes and public opinion, exemplified by Item 10 (“I feel humiliated if I make a mistake in front of a group”), Item 16 (“I am very much afraid of making mistakes in public”), Item 19 (“I often worry about looking stupid”), and Item 23 (“I worry about making a fool out of myself”). Loadings range from .58 to .79.
4. Appearance and Exposure Concerns: Involves physical presentation and emotional vulnerability, captured by Item 2 (“I don't feel comfortable in public unless my clothing, hair, etc. are just right”), Item 8 (“I feel uncomfortable leaving the house when I don't look my best”), Item 9 (“Sometimes I just feel exposed”), and Item 12 (“I often feel emotionally exposed in public and with groups of people”). Loadings range from .48 to .71.

Confirmatory factor analyses testing a hierarchical model (one higher-order dispositional embarrassability factor governing four lower-order factors) have demonstrated adequate fit indices (RMSEA ≈ .056, CFI = .94, TLI = .93, SRMR = .048), justifying both the calculation of an aggregate total score and the analysis of discrete subscale profiles.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Standardized self-report psychometric rating scale.
• Format: Paper-and-pencil or secure computer-administered questionnaire.
• Number of Items: 25 items.
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert-type scale anchored from 1 (“not at all like me”) to 7 (“very much like me”). Intermediate points: 2, 3, 4 (“neutral / moderately like me”), 5, 6.
• Reverse-Scored Items: Three items are framed in a socially confident or non-embarrassable direction and must be reversed prior to scoring: Item 4, Item 18, and Item 25. The scoring inversion formula is: Score = 8 – Original Response.
• Scoring Procedure: Sum all 25 individual item scores (after reversing items 4, 18, and 25). Total possible scores range from 25 to 175. Higher scores indicate greater dispositional susceptibility to embarrassment.
• Normative Interpretation:
  • 25 – 65: Low embarrassability (socially resilient, uninhibited, low concern regarding evaluation).
  • 66 – 110: Average / normative embarrassability (context-appropriate sensitivity to social mishaps).
  • 111 – 145: Moderate to high embarrassability (elevated self-presentational distress, frequent anticipatory dread).
  • 146 – 175: Severe embarrassability (debilitating fear of humiliation, pervasive behavioral avoidance, clinical relevance).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Susceptibility to Embarrassment Scale was originally authored by Kevin M. Kelly and Warren H. Jones and published in 1997 in the peer-reviewed journal Anxiety, Stress, and Coping. The instrument is considered an open academic measurement tool accessible for non-commercial academic research, pedagogical purposes, and non-profit clinical investigations without licensing fees, provided proper citation is attributed to the original authors. For commercial applications, diagnostic battery integration, or computerized testing software monetization, permissions should be secured from the copyright holders or the journal's publishing entity (Taylor & Francis / Routledge).

References

• Kelly, K. M., & Jones, W. H. (1997). Assessment of dispositional embarrassability. Anxiety, Stress, and Coping, 10(4), 307–333. https://doi.org/10.1080/10615809708249306
• Leary, M. R., Jongman-Sereno, K. P., & Diebels, K. J. (2015). Measures of concerns with public image and social evaluation. In G. J. Boyle, D. H. Saklofske, & G. Matthews (Eds.), Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Constructs (pp. 448–473). Academic Press / Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-386915-9.00016-4
• Maltby, J., & Day, L. (2000). The reliability and validity of a susceptibility to embarrassment scale among adults. Personality and Individual Differences, 29(4), 749–756. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(99)00229-4
• Miller, R. S. (1995). On the nature of embarrassability: Shyness, social evaluation, and social skill. Journal of Personality, 63(2), 315–339. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1995.tb00812.x
• Modigliani, A. (1968). Embarrassment and embarrassability. Sociometry, 31(3), 313–326. https://doi.org/10.2307/2786376
• Schlenker, B. R., & Leary, M. R. (1982). Social anxiety and self-presentation: A conceptualization and model. Psychological Bulletin, 92(3), 641–669. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.92.3.641

Items of the Scale