关键词: 尴尬, 共情尴尬, 自身尴尬, 助人决策

Abstract: It hasnt come to any unanimous conclusion about whether embarrassment, a kind of moral emotion, has positive effect on the decision to help others, or not. Choosing ninety-two undergraduates from Nanjing as participants, this study divided them randomly into selfembarrassment group, empathic embarrassment group as well as neutral group, and set donating situation and offering help time situation, where all the participants would make the helping decision after inducing selfembarrassment and empathic embarrassment. The results were compared with the baseline helping decision of neutral group and also the gender differences were compared. The findings show that the main effects of different types of embarrassment and the gender are significant in the donating situation, while the main effects or interaction effects of different types of embarrassment are not significant in the offering help time situation, which suggest that embarrassment has a certain positive role in the helping decision, whose effect is related to the specific helping situations. This study provides a new perspective for the exploration between embarrassment and the helping decision as well as the helping behavior.

Key words: embarrassment, empathic embarrassment, selfembarrassment, the helping decision