Implicit displays of emotional vulnerability: A cross-cultural analysis of “unacceptable” embarrassment-related emotions in the communication within male groups

1 Introduction

Although the suggested term “emotional vulnerability” is a vague notion, the existing definitions relate it to the experience of “a range of … emotions … that do not include those of pleasurable sort (e.g., joy), but of the painful ones as well […]. This vulnerability necessarily entails a disposition to experience disturbing, painful, and even undesired emotions” (Sirvent 2017, 71). However, the ascription of emotional vulnerability to males remains difficult because of the broadness of the notion “vulnerability.”

The broad notion of emotional vulnerability is closely related to one’s social discomfort and can therefore be understood as an (in)voluntary display of sensitivity to certain stimuli that are evaluated negatively. Although the display of numerous painful emotions (sadness, anxiety, shame, embarrassment, or fear) can demonstrate vulnerability, in this article I will concentrate on cross-cultural peculiarities in the interactional display of embarrassment-related emotions that contradict masculine stereotypes pertaining to emotional stoicism and emotional suppression (cf. Connell 1995, Kindlon and Thompson 1999, Coates 2003).

Because the masculinities demonstrate the wide variability, the display of undesirable emotions and its correlation with hegemonic masculinities should not be understood as an apparent mismatch. A further argument against the alleged (and therefore oversimplified) unemotional traits of males is its implicitness: Although the explicit verbalization of emotions using such expressions as “I am embarrassed”/“I am feeling vulnerable” is underrepresented in male talk, the conveyance of certain inner states using only words with a reference to this inner state is insufficient for describing emotions.^[1]

The study addresses the following research questions:

• What are the most salient triggers of embarrassment that stimulate the displays of this emotion in interactions within male groups?

• How are the embarrassment-related dispositions expressed in naturally occurring spoken interaction?

• Which cross-cultural variations can be detected in the display of embarrassment-related emotions?

The article is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the data and methods used in this study, whereas Section 3 provides a brief overview of the state of research on men’s emotionality and outlines the gaps in this field. Section 4 focuses on the definition of embarrassment and embarrassment-related emotions, whereas Sections 5 and 6 present common embarrassment triggers and displays of shame in the conversations of Ukrainian and Austrian males. Section 7 concludes the article.

2 Data and methods

The analysis is based on a collection of 25 h of naturally occurring conversations in dyadic and multiple all-male groups in Austria and 23 h of comparable recordings in Ukraine. The data were collected between 2018 and 2020 using the techniques of opened, pseudo-opened recording in all-male groups. The methods of data collection include:

• participant observation “going native” (Kallmeyer 2005, 986), when the identity of the researcher remains anonymous to the participants until a certain moment. This is meant to minimalize the observer paradox during the recordings. To gain insight into the communication of male groups, the author took several steps: establishing trusting relationships with members of in-groups. Months of informal conversations made it possible. Second, the participants were formalized with main project goals and were asked for permission to conduct self-recordings while speaking within male groups, after that the recordings on voluntary basis were conducted.

• recordings conducted with the presence of the researcher, whereby 10–15 min of the opened recordings were omitted by duration of the conversation at least 40 min to minimalize the observer paradox.

The spontaneous conversations among friends/acquaintances include men from different communities of practice and wide range of ages (the participants ranged in age from 17 to 55 years old, but the participation of adolescent males in the conversations in all-male groups was low, they did not provide substantive contributions to the conversation because of lower status within the group; 15 all-male groups in Austria and 25 groups in Ukraine participated in the project). All-male groups in Ukraine were recorded in the border region, where two languages (Ukrainian, Russian) are spoken, so the participant sometimes use Ukrainian, sometimes Russian language, and often the mix of the two, with what appears to be frequent code switching. The main aim of the study was the investigation of male talk in more familiar settings,^[2] so the ties of friendship unite all the recorded male groups. In both countries, various groups of friends with different professional background participated in the conversations (mainly workers and students).

The investigation of embarrassment-displays in the interaction within male groups requires the examination of settings, where this emotion occur (e.g., circumstances of being recorded and evaluated). The study combines quantitative^[3] and qualitative approaches^[4] and uses the discourse-functional approach also, which means the interpretation of linguistic/paralinguistic indices in the certain situational context and their functions in discourse (cf. Alba-Juez and Mackenzie 2019). The interpretation of embarrassment-displays in interaction was understood within “action sequences that give them their meaning” (Weatherall and Robles 2021, 12). For description of the embarrassment-emotion was adopted next-turn proof procedure as method of corpus linguistics and conversational analysis, which observes how “speakers display in their sequentially ‘next’ turns an understanding of what the ‘prior’ turn was about” (Hutchby and Wooffitt 2008, 13).

The study was conducted in compliance with the ethical principles of research, including informed consent and confidentiality. Transcription conventions follow mainly the GAT [Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem] conventions.

3 State of research on men’s emotionality and eventual gaps

Within gender linguistics, the expression of emotion in conversation as part of gender identity construction has mainly been ascribed to women. The negative emotions expressed via rough talk, as far as emotional suppression and control (cf. Lakoff 1973, Badinter 1993, Fischer and Manstead 2000), were stereotypically attributed to the communication within male groups instead.

With regard to gender identity, affective or emotional behavior can be indicated through linguistic choices and is conveyed on different levels of linguistic structures, particularly:

1. Through lexical choices such as the preference for intensifiers that could be connected to gender differences in emotional expression. The view of a division in emotional expressions appeared in Lakoff’s study, in which the use of stronger (shit, damn) and weaker (oh dear, goodness) expletives was associated with “the strength of an emotion conveyed in a sentence” (Lakoff 1973, 50) and a particular gender. The study by Stenström et al. (2002) revealed that boys used stronger swear words (including taboo words such as bloody or fucking), whereas girls preferred weaker expletives.

2. Phonologically based differences were linked to differences in emotional expression, such as intonational dynamism as a possible indicator of emotional expressiveness. The criterion of intonational dynamism is less applicable to the speech of English-speaking men, who “showed much less variation in fundamental frequency and […] they shifted the frequency less often than women or men whose speech was heard as effeminate” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 2003, 177). An indirect indicator of masculinity associated with power can be also voice pitch; that is, “low pitch indexes size and authority, and these qualities are further indexed with masculinity” (Kiesling 2007, 661). The study of Acuña-Ferreira (2002/2003) observes the gender differences in the use of emphatic accentuation, “prosodic patterns and interjectional expressions to note ritualized “surprise” as attuning strategies” (ibid. 2002/2003, 167), in the communication of women and shifts in volume and time at the end of the turn and pronounced intonational falls in that of men.

3. Discourse-based expressions of emotionality. Previous studies connect the revelation of feelings to phenomenon of self-disclosure and claim that in the narratives within male groups, it is not as common to reveal feelings as it is in all-female talk; according to Coates:

men’s first-person narratives, by contrast, focus more on achievement and triumph, or on the more banal happenings of everyday life, and are not designed to reveal feelings (Coates 2003, 73).

Taking the sociolinguistic variable of age into account, Coates pointed out that self-disclosure in men’s conversations occurred more often in groups of older men than it did in groups of younger men. Nonetheless, some of the examples in her corpus prove the opposite: the talk of certain groups involved self-disclosure and may thus have represented an alternative discourse of hegemonic masculinity. In one of the conversations, the participants made some observations of all-male talk, in which one of them pleaded for unhidden vulnerability that “is not necessarily bad but maybe a useful reminder of our humanity” (Coates 2003, 77). The stereotypical view of males’ emotional inexpressiveness has been partly dispelled by the interactional sociolinguistic (cf. Peräkylä and Sorjonen 2012) approach, which focuses on the manifestation of emotions in interactions and the emotional underpinnings of activities. In this regard, it is more appropriate to speak about the significant resources whereby males convey emotion in practice as “a nexus of doings and sayings” (Scheer 2012, 200).

Other sufficient point in the discourse-based expressions of emotionality is related to heteronormative masculinities (masculinities that were also an object of this research) and the fact that hegemonic masculinity is presented on gendered interactional norms. Such influence of societal gender stereotypes means that men “avoid ways of talking that might be associated with femininity” (Coates 2003, 42) and that masculine discursive style norms determine appropriate men’s behavior, including ways of interacting (cf. Holmes 2006).

Although the expression of painful emotions (and embarrassment in particular) in interactions has not received much attention, there are some findings reflecting discursively conveyed affective meanings to display discomfort:

1. Through laughter as “an unconscious response to uncomfortable situations” (Nikopoulos 2017, 13) – for example, manifestations of nervousness as inappropriate/“out of place” laughter without an “explicit laugh invitation from […] interlocutors” (Glenn 2013, 257), as a link “to negative states such as anger, shame” (Owren and Bachorowski 2003, 188), and as marker of discomfort or lower status – for example, aspirated laughter (Glenn 2013).

2. In certain verbal actions when the author “detaches him/herself from responsibility for what is being reported” (Martin and White 2005, 113). The spectrum of such actions could be broad – from swear words while expressing emotion of disagreement to vocatives and request sentences with primary and/or secondary illocution request that convey the negative evaluation of what is being said. Also, such distancing can be expressed even more implicitly – nonverbally, for example, in silence as a possible marker of (partial) disengagement with thematic shifting afterward.

Another problem is those with the delimitation of painful emotions, and particularly differentiating the emotion of embarrassment from other related emotions, is resolvable in linguistics within the frameworks of the semantic primitives (cf. Wierzbicka 1992) and pragmatics approach.

Although the first view is considered to be “an artificial constructionist” approach “which is unable to deal with competence-in-performance” (Weigand 2004, 13), the second is more appropriate for the description of language in use. Using this approach to the description of embarrassment would make it impossible to separate “embarrassment” from such related emotions as “shame” or even discouragement, awkwardness, or confusion, particularly with regard to “language specific sets based on family resemblance, [where] the whole family [is] some sort of prototype^[5]” (Weigand 2004, 15). Therefore, the emotion of embarrassment will be understood as a bundle of interconnected emotions within the cluster shame, as a subtype of this emotional state.

4 Embarrassment as shame-related emotion

As mentioned previously, the emotion of embarrassment will be considered here as subtype of shame, namely as a social shame (when one feels embarrassed for smb.) or shame-discomfort (uncomfortable/embarrassed) according to the classification of Apresyan (2014), who considers also ethical shame and shame-stigma as subtypes of shame. Embarrassment “is experienced, when one feels too open, exposed to the public; when something intensely personal and not intended for prying eyes or ears, becomes known to all. The person, who experiences embarrassment, is afraid of appearing ridiculous [as narrow-minded person] or insecure to other people” (Apresyan 2014, 414).

The emotion of shame was primarily defined as a “feminine characteristic par excellence” (Freud 1965, 164) that was connected to a “loss of situational self-esteem” (Wierzbicka 1992, 120) and is interwoven with other mental states, which is why it is also considered to be an “auxiliary emotion, or as composite of other emotions such as fear, anger, or self-disgust” (Gilbert 1998, 4). As the semantic constituents of embarrassment as shame-related emotion were explained by Wierzbicka (1992, 133),^[6] and the adaptation of the language-in-use perspective provides a broad view on embarrassment, it is pertinent to describe the family resemblance relationship of embarrassment as a set of shame-related emotions that have several elements in common:

1. A norm violation experienced by a single individual or by the public. In both cases, the norm violation entails the awareness of having done something wrong that will trigger certain displays in front of others.

2. Performances that express an impulse to leave or desire to disappear without this being possible or a wish that the event had not happened. The expressions of such wishes could be explicit or implicit, being indicated by certain cues that mark the failure of some practices. The implicit expressions of embarrassment can be understood as a low-visible “state of [this emotion] that is largely unconscious” (Retzinger 1998, 209).

However, there are also some subtle differences that depend on the experiencer in the sense that the emotion is expressed by individuals or by a group of people:

1. Individual shame/embarrassment is experienced due to the norm being violated by the Agens himself. In this case, the Agens is the causator of his or her own embarrassment as a result of his or her own wrong doings.^[7] In terms of Apresyan (2010, 665), “person A1 feels uncomfortable because he/she […] has violated the norm A2 which will make people (A3) think worse of him/her.”

2. Individual shame/embarrassment experienced by a non-actual speaker who explicitly or implicitly points out the eventual norm violation. In this case, we can also speak about the initiation of shame-related emotions by others, who witnessed “wrong doings” of a certain speaker. The Experiencer of shame is therefore the person who is involved in the same action (holding conversational floor) with the Agens. This group, in turn, could be subdivided in parts:

1. When someone from the community of practice (CoP) points out the deviation from the norm perpetrated by the current speaker to make him or her feel remorseful or ashamed, although the person being shamed may not consider his or her behavior to have deviated from the norm. In such cases, “person A1 tells A2 that he/she has done/allowed bad things to happen (A3), A1 wishes that A2 would be ashamed” (Apresyan 2010, 665).

2. When someone from the CoP reacts to the violation of the norm committed by others (this usually occurs in dyadic groups with stronger connections among the participants), but the deviation from the norm is not pointed out to avoid damaging the self-esteem of the Agens.

3. When someone from the community feels embarrassed for the extended self, while retelling stories in which the Experiencer of embarrassment was not himself, but someone from the in-group she/he belongs. In this case, the current floor-holder refreshes the experiences of others/himself and feels with them. Such embarrassment is often “derived” from disappointment (see Excerpt 11).

1. Collective embarrassment-experience “as affective evaluations of what the group has done” (Schmid 2014, 9). In such cases, the entire group usually experiences shame-related emotions for the wrong doings of the group, which can harm its collective identity. However, the boundaries between public support of individual embarrassment-experiences (e.g., with collective laughter) and collective embarrassment (when everyone from the CoP displays his embarrassment) can become blurred.

5 Common embarrassment-triggers/-displays in conversations of Ukrainian males

It was observed that men experienced embarrassment as shame-related emotion, particularly when being recorded. Under these circumstances, the conversational participants often explicitly or implicitly evaluated the propositional content of the utterance and displayed their disagreement with the expressed proposition. The most causes of embarrassment-displays seem to be triggered by the perspective of being evaluated by female researcher and can be grouped as follows:

1. Performance/reflection of habitual practices that could damage the face of interlocutors, so that the researcher could make stereotypical assumption about limited abilities or features of the community as a whole or somebody as community member;

2. Possible damage to the face of the individuals who were chosen as the targets of face-threatening acts by other participants in the CoP – in this case, we can observe the display of shame/embarrassment by the victim of the face-threatening act in front of other CoP members;

3. confessing the wrong doings to other CoP members.

Sixty cases of possible embarrassment-displays that were initiated by an active floor-holder or by non-actual speakers were extracted from the Ukrainian data corpus. When the active floor-holder realized that he had violated some norms and was the causator of his own embarrassment, his concern about the individual image was supported by the public in most cases (cf. Table 1).

According to this, the most common triggers of shame could be grouped as follows:

1. Sexual jokes while being recorded. In the minds of interlocutors can the performance of such practice damage the face of the interlocutors in front of observer, so that the researcher could make stereotypical assumption about limited abilities or features of the community as a whole or somebody as a community member (cf. Excerpt 1).

Excerpt 1^[8].

The excerpt above presents a case of Agentive-initiated experiences of embarrassment supported by the public that were expressed implicitly – through weakly voiced laugh particles, but in context, this laughter is often combined with expressiva (e.g., apologies for sexual jokes in front of female observer in line 4) and was often supported by the pressed unvoiced laughter of the rest of the community. The collective pressed aspirated laughter in this excerpt indicates feelings of discomfort and embarrassment when the males engaged in the familiar routines such as telling jokes, including sexual ones, and realized that they could possibly be understood incorrectly.

The collective quasi-simultaneous laughter in the first excerpt began immediately after the tape recorder had been turned on and was characterized by the following parameters:

1. Long duration (the collective laughter lasts for about 9 s) and the combination of laugh particles with voiced vowels /e/.^[9] These characteristics of laughter contrast “with descriptors like hearty and mirthful to refer to laughs readily accounted for by amusement or pleasure” (Glenn 2013, 256) and can be a sign of discomfort (cf. Hepburn and Varney 2013).

2. Fluctuations in the intensity (maximum intensity –80 dB; minimum intensity of voiced syllables – 52 dB), which could be evidence of experiencing unpleasant emotions such as stress or arousal (cf. Scherer et al. 2003).

3. Percentage of voiced syllables and unvoiced parts (unvoiced hh, audible inbreaths, nasal/snorting laughter with the mouth closed and the laugh being emitted via the nose – approximately 2.4 s), a high level of breathiness (jitter [local]: 5.063%, shimmer [local]: 16.997%) (Figure 1).

1. Revealing his inner wishes while being recorded and therefore allowing the observer into the personal space, including the revelation of some habits (such as drinking) and desires (sexual and material desires). A classic example of such embarrassment-display after revelation of inner wishes presents the next example (Excerpt 2).

Figure 1

PRAAT-Graphic showing the intensity of laughter in the first excerpt.

Excerpt 2.

After receiving a positive nonverbal answer to his directive speech act (line 11/12), the current floor-holder displays his embarrassment in the jocular accusation targeted at the person conducting the research in line 13. Because his swearing can be also interpreted incorrectly by the observer and harm his image, he apologizes for his behavior in the following turns. As in the first Excerpt, the remarkable embarrassment-displays in the group were the collective weak laughter and hh without a voiced vowel (line 13) that reveals some type of discomfort. The apologies for the use of swear words and promises to cut off the recorded talk (lines 16–18) demonstrate a kind of regret about the situation that happened.

In the subgroup Agentive experiences of embarrassment supported by the public, other widespread triggers were the unintentional revelation of some details about personal lives that the participants wanted to hide from the observers, use of racist language, the verbalizations of experiences of fear, forgetfulness, cursing or swearing while being recorded. The reflexion upon own actions was normally marked non-/paraverbally, for example, by collective weak laughter that merges into an aspirated laughter, audible outbreath, tongue clicking, or an ah-interjection after above-mentioned actions (Figure 2). In all cases, these displays did not appear singularly, but often in a combination with each other so I can obviously speak about mutual understanding of norm violation. In Excerpt 3, the mutual understanding of racial utterance is combined with the assurance (line 23) not to use the racist language again:

Figure 2

Ah-marker after racial utterance in excerpt 3.

Excerpt 3.

The second subgroup, which was connected to individual experiences of embarrassment without public support, mainly included such practices as complaints when the speaker experienced embarrassment because of certain circumstances (e.g., earning a small salary), complaints about unsuccessful car maneuvers, the loss of athletic shape, and laziness that affected the life of the narrator negatively. These practices were usually extremely limited in terms of time and included a maximum of two sequences. After performing such practices, the narrator evaluated them metapragmatically, usually by using an audible outbreath, a short silence, or a snort laughter.

An interesting case in this group presented practices that contained a thematization of weakness (e.g., vomiting during a flight) and direct confessions of shame or embarrassment. However, before confessing his own emotions, the interlocutor retold same experiences of other people and then spoke about his own experience to show that he was “not alone” in this weakness and to mask his feelings (as can be seen in Excerpt 4):

Excerpt 4.

It is important to note that swear words such as blyat´ (fuck) and the softer interjection blin (shit/damn) not only marked the dissatisfaction of the utterance performer, but had probably, the other function in this excerpt. The use of swear words (lines 11, 14, and 19) when speaking about experiencing the feeling of shame served as an emotional distraction from the unpleasant emotions experienced by males when revealing their vulnerability. Strong emotions associated with aggressiveness may compensate for or mask the description of embarrassment and frustration in some way. The same phenomen was also observed in the study of Acuña-Ferreira (2002/2003, 166) when the intense emotive display in male conversation and the use of very strong language can be used to intensify the indignation at disastrous events.

The largest group (65% or 39 of all cases) in the Ukrainian corpus contained practices initiated by someone in the CoP – who had pointed out a norm violation that had been committed by an actual speaker. In this subgroup, I allocated the cases, when somebody feels embarrassed for Agens, shames Agens or feels kind of discomfort because the current speaker has done sth. wrong. This group included at least two subgroups of direct and indirect indicators of norm violation with the domination of the last one (Table 2).

The next extract will demonstrate the use of some displays within these three subgroups. In Excerpt 5, the participants display their embarrassment several times:

Excerpt 5.

In Excerpt 5, most of the embarrassment-displays were caused by thematization of habits that could damage the image of some of the group members in front of the observer. The possible emotion of embarrassment arose at least three times:

1. lines 02–07 when the prohibited practices of swearing appeared again. After unintentional use of swear word blin (engl. damn), the speaker Vo performs an ironic utterance through repetition of this word (indirect accuse), afterward appears a collective laughter with a maximum intensity of 79 dB as a sign of understanding that the recurrent practice of swearing could impact the collective image negatively;

2. in the form of an audible outbreath after a jocular accusation of being drunk (line 10) and, in line 14, as an indirect accusation of the performer of the utterance with the primary illocution of reproach and question as a secondary one. This reproach appears in response to an utterance contained in a conventional implicature, so that the addressee could be seen as a frequent consumer of alcohol (Figure 3).

Figure 3

Audible outbreath as a sign of confusion (line 10, Ex. 5).

The prohibitions performed directly appear in Ukrainian corpus mostly after use of swear words. It is of note that such speech acts also usually had downstepped contours. The downstep in the pitch accent in the request could mark the intention of the speaker (to prevent the other interlocutor from further swearing), and some downstepped accents could be also connected to a “disgruntled closing statement in a conversation” (Gussenhoven, 2017, 574). An example of such a short request is presented in Excerpt 6, line 100. The accented syllable has 80.6 dB, which was the maximum intensity of the phrase (Figure 4):

Figure 4

Request with downstep.

Excerpt 6.

Other admonishments for norm violations to make the interlocutor consider his actions or words could be triggered by:

1. grammatical mistakes made by other interlocutors that could disgrace the community in front of observers and cause the members of this community to be evaluated negatively by a third party;

2. certain statements that revealed the racism and xenophobia of other participants, which could be incorrectly applied to the beliefs of the entire community while listening to a conversation – the emergence of such a stereotype is possible on the basis of the extended self when external objects are viewed as part of the speaker;

3. boasting of brutal behavior while playing football by one of the participants in the interaction;

4. revelation of a close relationship between participants in a conversation through the use of diminutives with meliorative connotations. Such practices performed by others could present the addressee as being subordinate or inexperienced;

5. speaking about a person by discussing his/her appearance. In the present data, the speaker did not experience shame when making such utterances, but his interaction partner produces an aspirated laugh in response to such statements “in the absence of a joke or other appropriate event” (Glenn 2013, 256), which could mark his negative evaluation of the statement and feelings of shame for the partner of conversation in front of the observer;

6. revelation of interests that were considered to be limiting, revealing arrogance, self-complimentary, or hinting at being gay.

As mentioned above, the accusations with the intention of invoking remorse predominated within the group Embarrassment for others/ashaming others; in such speech acts, the directive illocution can be decoded implicitly. In this case, it was not a display of embarrassment-related emotions per se, but rather an expression of disapproval that could elicit the emotion of embarrassment (cf. Gilbert 1998). Such implicit shaming often occurred in Ukrainian data in utterances with emphatic rheme, where the theme of the second part of the adjacency pair is the situation that provokes the reply. In Excerpt 7, the negative evaluation of the speaker actions (norm violation through rudeness) was expressed via swearing (line 205) with the intention of evoking feelings of regret or shame in the speaker through the demonstration of condemnation (Figure 5):

Figure 5

Dissatisfaction shown through downstepping.

Excerpt 7.

Apart from the cases mentioned above, stand practices (5% or three cases) displayed collective embarrassment for the collective identity. In such cases, the embarrassment resulted from not meeting group-oriented identity expectations connected with the feeling of belonging to a certain group (such as a group of good football players, the Ukrainians, and the like). The distinction between shame/embarrassment that implied a reflection on the self and pain-related emotions could be extremely subtle in such cases because of the implicit connections of the mentioned emotions. In Excerpt 8, the connection between embarrassment and pain is obvious in the emotional implicatures and the pragmatic inferences or enrichments (emotionally charged situation: our team has lost in a competition → emotional implicature: pain → possible shame-display with implicit judgments of the group enrichment: “team I also belong to is incapable to do smth./I do not want to participate in the future games of the team because I will be judged as a looser”). The markers of collective displays of embarrassment in this case could be a lengthy silence (line 112) after portraying the loss, swear words to refer to the collective actions. I should also state that the participants in this group often tended to hide their feelings by portraying the loss in a humorous way. But the hidden emotions of embarrassment and processing of collective pain are more or less evident through emotional stance markers such as modified voice (lines 103/111; see the figure and comments below) and audible outbreaths after loss thematization (Figure 6):

Figure 6

Praat figure “nevezykha” (Ex.8).

Excerpt 8.

A brief overview of embarrassment-displays in the Ukrainian data is presented in Table 3:

6 Common embarrassment triggers and displays in the conversations of Austrian males

The analysis of embarrassment as shame-related emotion based on the Austrian corpus revealed many similarities to the same triggers in the Ukrainian data. As in the Ukrainian data, the most common embarrassment triggers in male communities in Austria were associated with:

1. The circumstance of being recorded (85% of all cases), which was an unusual or even stressful experience for the participants. Thus, it can be postulated that the fact of being recording caused the interlocutors to reflect on their own behavior or on the appropriateness of this behavior. This type of reflection was epitomized in the communicative practice of an individual or by a group of speakers.

2. Protection of the individual face in front of other members of the CoP when someone from the community performed a face-threatening act that required the protection of his identity (e.g., hints about being gay).

From conversational data recorded in Austria were extracted 85 embarrassment-displays that were initiated by an Agens, who noticed some norm-deviations in his behavior, or by someone from the CoP. In contrast to the Ukrainian data, the males in the Austrian conversations used preventive strategies more often to avoid future judgments by a potential observer, and therefore, demonstrated concern for the mutual face (cf. Ting-Toomey 2005) as a result of group-connectivity. Such practices comprised a certain mental attitude of discomfort and awareness of the consequences of analysis. A distinctive feature of the Austrian data was the prevalence of displays of collective shame for norm violation in front of the observer, which could also have had a negative impact on the images of individuals. Some differences were also observed concerning experiencer of embarrassment and the direction of his face-concern (concern for individual or collective face). In comparison with same results drawn from Ukrainian data, we can see the prevalence of embarrassment-displays for collective identity. The rough overview about number of collective and agentive experiences of embarrassment given in Table 4:

Let me illustrate some of these displays in front of the observer, which were classified as agentive-initiated supported by public and occurred as speculations about how the recordings would impact on the image of certain participants and on the group as a whole. Imagining being evaluated negatively was expressed in the practice of fantasizing. The CoP members often spun the initiated topic out or supported the initiator of the topic with laughter. The prime example of this can be seen in Excerpt 9, in which one of the interlocutors (line 56) gave his subjective view about the prospect of being recorded in a hyperbolic way, and the issues he mentioned were ironically elaborated on by others (lines 59 and 60).

Figure 7

Weak laughter after agentive-initiated perspective of evaluation (line 58).

Excerpt 9.

In the excerpt, we have a classical antecedent of embarrassment–embarrassing situation of being recorded, which triggers the defensive strategy of self-disparaging descriptions. The display of individual embarrassment was often underpinned by paraverbal cues such as weak laughter with a decreasing intensity of laugh particles (line 58 and Figure 7 showing the intensity of particles as 86, 84.8, and 83 dB) and an audible outbreath (line 62, Figure 8). The collective silence in line 63 was classified as an example of collective embarrassment.

Figure 8

Audible outbreath with intensity of 76 dB.

Other examples of self-disclosure in front of the observer occurred after raising intimate topics, discussing bad smells, confessing bad habits, acting out daft practices, making jocular remarks with sexist or racist content, engaging in physiological practices such as farting or belching, or inconsequent argumentation.

As in the Ukrainian data, the most widespread triggers in Austrian conversational corpus were linked to shaming others when it was not the actual speaker but someone from the CoP who pointed out the violation of the norm. The most common triggers in these cases were:

1. black humor, the discussion of physiological needs, jokes about women;

2. invading personal space by making hints about having an intimate relationship;

3. fooling around to avoid the possible judgment of the researcher as those who sank into dotage;

4. grammatical mistakes or accusations of being unassembled;

5. jocular practices in which the potential observer was the target;

6. certain statements that revealed the racism and xenophobia of other participants that could be incorrectly assumed to be the beliefs of the community as a whole;

7. performance of physiological practices.

The dissatisfaction of someone from the CoP when witnessing “wrong” doings was mainly expressed verbally in indirect directive speech acts such as requests or reproaches, prescriptions to others to control the verbal behavior, vocatives, and rhetorical questions. Not uncommon were also self-prohibitions because of current speaker concerns that some actions could affect his image negatively. In the next excerpt, such prohibitions can be found in line 100. The use of reassurance signals (wasch in lines 103 and 105) at the end of the utterances not only requires a reaction from the listener, but also conveyed a type of mental state (cf. Harder 2010) related to the beliefs, plans, and feelings [to make a good impression one should control his verbal behavior/“unclever” appearance is a sign of immaturity] of the interlocutors. The speaker used this marker to “reach the situation in the meta-knowledge matrix, in other words, to create situation in which the speaker knows about knowledge which is shared with hearer” (Schiffrin, 1988, 269).

Excerpt 10.

It should be noted that, in the Austrian and in the Ukrainian data, implicit requests for others to control their behavior mainly had downstepped contours; but the Austrian men sometimes also split words into syllables to strengthen the illocution of the request. An example of this is shown in the graph below, in which the adverb “genau” (English “exactly”) was used ironically as a reaction to some doings that caused discomfort in others (Figure 9).

Figure 9

Word-splitting in requests.

Para/nonverbal expression of dissatisfaction in Austrian data included such displays as audible outbreaths, ah-interjection after discussion of compromising issues/performance of physiological practices, growling, cleaning throat, laughter, and interjections bäh/moa.

The word-splitting strategy was also found in practices when the interlocutors constructed their (in-group) identity by dissociating themselves from those who could harm the collective identity. The participants in these interactions implicitly or explicitly outline the reasons for distancing themselves from certain group members. In such cases, the fact of being recorded and evaluated by the researcher did not play a significant role; it was more important for the interactants to avoid the possible negative judgment by other members of community through generalization; see Excerpt 11.

Excerpt 11.

The excerpt is a classic example of teasing because the speaker, LA, who belonged to the group of teacher-students, provided his own assessment of an incompetent member of the group through such cues as:

1. The choice of the verbum dicendi and the quotation particle (fragt so, line 215) for dramatic and authentic presentation of the event. The narrator also marked the otherness by differences in the pitch register when he selected a different tone quality for the subject about whom he was speaking (line 216). Therefore, he conveyed his assessment through irony by choosing “some kind of tone of voice” (Braun and Schmiedel 2018, 113).

2. By slowing the speech speed, scansion and splitting words into syllables (lines 218–223), and usage of the downstepped contours marks his critical viewpoint of incompetence.^[12]

3. The final remark in line 226 conveys a negative evaluation via the marker (krass -engl. extreme), whereas the long-lasting silence (line 227) could be interpreted as a sign of the conversion of emotional tension, but could also be associated with negative impression [and embarrassment for extended self] of the speaker.

Some differences between the Ukrainian and Austrian corpora were also related to implicit paraverbal shame markers; the common verbal and paraverbal markers in the Austrian data are presented in Table 5.

7 Conclusions

It can be claimed that the display of “action-triggered emotions” (Daneš 2004, 27), and of embarrassment-related emotions in particular, contradicted the stereotypical view of masculinity^[13] that denies all forms of weakness. But despite this, gendered norms and societal gender stereotypes determine the communicative behavior of males in both countries. In Austria and Ukraine prevailed implicit expression of embarrassment-related emotions, which can be explained by the influence of hegemonic masculinity norms – in this case, the display of certain emotions, such as those that display vulnerability, is tabooed in the case of males. It was also observed that males tried to hide their embarrassment through aggressive expressions of emotions or self-depreciating humour.

The data analysis also revealed that, in most cases, the individual feelings of embarrassment were shared by others in the CoP; the cases of shaming others when the counterpart of the interlocutor noticed his violation of the norm and drew his attention to it to invoke remorse in the person were more prevalent in the Ukrainian data.

Although embarrassment is a highly subjective feeling, the most frequent embarrassment trigger in the Ukrainian data was the use of swear words; while the use of taboo words is quite common practice in some communities, the circumstances of being recorded and the perspective of further evaluation also triggered feelings of embarrassment and influenced the self-correction or avoidance of such behavior, as it was believed to be harmful to the community members. In the Austrian data, swearing was underrepresented as an embarrassment trigger; instead, many of the embarrassment-displays were triggered by designing scenarios and fantasizing about how the recordings that were conducted would impact on the image of the group. Furthermore, concern for the mutual face, or concern about the collective image, was prevalent in the Austrian data and was based on “the perception of self and others as a cognitive unit” (Dashtipour 2012, 56).

Despite the numerous similarities in the markers of embarrassment, some differences were observed in the request performance; the requests in the Austrian corpus mainly had downstepped contours (as in the Ukrainian data), but the conveyance of embarrassment through word splitting to strengthen the illocution of directive speech acts was found only in the Austrian data. A richer palette of embarrassment-displays (such as paraphrases, growling, throat cleaning, and self-depreciating humor) was found only in the Austrian data.

The article contributes to the research on gender linguistics and interlacement of language and emotions. It was shown that men feel the embarrassment, but usually try to mask this feeling in some way; the special attention was paid to emotion expression through different contextualization cues and their combinations. Based on these findings, future research could seek to document the broad spectrum of emotions that induce vulnerability in different domains of social life while paying attention to gender-based differences in the construction of emotional stances.