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Trivia: On Blushing.

 

We've all been in those embarrassing situations, when we've felt the color involuntarily rising in our cheeks – and our red face only makes us more embarrassed! Why do we blush? Here's what Darwin believed:


"Charles Darwin … [believed] that blushing is a warning that the individual who is blushing is not to be trusted, as he or she has violated the mores of the group or has committed some crime. This notion that blushing is a visible warning sign that an individual is not to be trusted, Darwin puts forward in Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Part of his evidence is that children before the age of understanding social rules do not blush, for the 'mental powers of infants are not sufficiently developed to allow of their blushing.'"

"… Darwin wished to discover how far down the body blushes extend, so he adopted the ingenious notion of asking his medical friends "who necessarily had frequent opportunities for observation". His friend Sir James Paget (1814–99, who wrote the standard texts, Lectures on Surgical Pathology and Clinical Lectures) reported that: "with women who blush intensely on the face, ears, nape of the neck, the blush does not commonly extend any lower down the body". He never saw an instance in which it extended below the upper part of the chest."


Source: Oxford Companion to the Mind (ed. Richard L. Gregory) Cosmopress, Geneva & DACS, London 1987.

 

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Article published on Aug 28 04 12:59AM.

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