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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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