Peinlichkeit

Embarrassment is classically reduced either to its visible, superficial level, and viewed as faux pas; or conceived emotionally as negative self esteem or social fear. Julia Döring, on the other hand, understands embarrassment as a genuinely communicative phenomenon, whereby an inner level of experience can be distinguished from an external level of event. With this fundamental analytical differentiation, she develops a comprehensive conceptual inventory of embarrassment, which also includes special forms of embarrassment, like so-called »Fremdscham« ( »surrogate embarrassment« ). By way of an empirical study on modern bachelor parties, she furthermore identifies possibilities, meanings and functions of ritualized embarrassment.

Julia Döring, Kommunikationswissenschaftlerin, promovierte bei Prof. em. Dr. H. Walter Schmitz am Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft der Universität Duisburg-Essen. Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte sind kommunikationstheoretische Grundlagen der Gesprächsführung, Kommunikation und Emotion sowie nachhaltige Organisationsentwicklung und Führung.