Take the Dread Out of Turning Red When You’re Embarrassed : Behavior: Being exposed to ridicule is something everyone must endure. But how you handle uncomfortable situations may be the key to your social survival.

Put yourself in the shoes--er, pants--of the foreign diplomat who, while getting up to leave an afternoon reception, noticed his fly was partially unzipped.

He sheepishly retreated to the couch to zip up, but in the process caught his tie in his fly. The hostess, noticing something amiss, offered her help. The diplomat, not wanting to draw attention to his predicament, shooed her away.

The diplomat resumed efforts to untangle himself. But with every jerk of his head, the knot tightened, and his face turned blue.

A crowd gathered around him. Finally, the hostess got a pair of scissors and snipped off the tie. As the diplomat rushed out the door, a piece of the cloth floated through the air.

Word of the diplomat’s social calamity spread rapidly through the community. People who were introduced to him instantly gazed down at his infamous fly. The ramifications became so embarrassing that the diplomat’s home country eventually recalled him.

“When a diplomat becomes a figure of fun, he becomes useless,” said Edward Gross, a University of Washington professor emeritus of sociology who declined to name the diplomat or his country so as not to further embarrass the man. “They gave him a job where no one would ever see him again.”

Gross is writing a book on embarrassment in America, and the diplomat’s predicament is but one of more than 3,000 boy-was-my-face-red incidents he has compiled and analyzed during 27 years of research.

More mundane instances range from public drunkenness to socks that don’t match.

“What it comes down to in the most general sense is that embarrassment refers to a situation in which some inadequacy is exposed to public gaze,” Gross explained. “Exposure is the key thing.”

Disgraced television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, for example, probably felt shame for his adulterous liaison with a prostitute, Gross said. But that shame turned to embarrassment when the public found out.

Derived from the French word embarrasser, meaning to stop or obstruct, Gross says embarrassment is a universal, uniquely human response with telltale physiological characteristics.

“When you’re embarrassed, you’ve committed some kind of public gaffe,” he said. “Something casts doubt on your ability to perform. Others are looking at you. What you need then is to think.”

So as blood rushes to the brain, your knees shake. Your stomach tightens. Your face turns red. You sweat and drool.

Such a reaction, Gross said, indicates that embarrassment played no trivial role in the evolution of the human species. “It’s some sort of signal in which the victim is in effect saying to other people, ‘I’m in trouble. Please help me,’ ” he said.

Judith Martin, who as the incomparably correct Miss Manners dispenses indispensable advice on such things, labels embarrassment a socially useful tool that helps reinforce proper standards of behavior.

“The proper use of embarrassment is as a conscience of manners. As your conscience might trouble you if you do anything immoral, your sense of embarrassment should be activated if you do anything unmannerly,” Miss Manners writes in her “Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior.”

Gross said embarrassment can be damaging if:

* It interrupts what’s going on. Like the soloist who forgets his part during a musical performance.

* It destroys reputations. Just ask the diplomat.

* People avoid doing things because they’re afraid of being embarrassed. Gross cites an extreme example of a man who got a piece of meat caught in his throat. Instead of asking for help, he insisted to his guests that he would be OK and left the table. He was found dead a half an hour later on the bathroom floor, having choked to death.

“He was unable to dislodge it,” Gross said. “He didn’t want to embarrass other people. It’s tragic what people will do to avoid embarrassment.”

Sometimes, embarrassment is beyond repair.

Consider President Bush throwing up in the lap of the Japanese prime minister during a state dinner.

“Was there anything he could have done to mitigate this? I doubt it,” Gross said. “Vomiting in our society is one of the kinds of embarrassment that can only be handled by prevention.”

Martin agrees that the situation was out of the realm of rescue.

“That one was beyond embarrassment,” she said. “Nobody said, ‘Gee, he should have done this, he should have done that.’ ”

Martin said Bush did well to mitigate the situation by joking about it later. In grave situations, she noted, laughter is not always inappropriate.

She cites the case of a woman in a strapless dress attending a “highly proper” Boston dinner party. The woman slipped, slid across the floor, fell face first into a bowl of guacamole dip and, in the process, “popped out” of her top.

The humiliating episode drew howls of laughter from many in the room, prompting one guest troubled by afterthoughts to write to Miss Manners, asking whether laughing was a proper response to “something like that.”

Miss Manners wrote back: “What do you mean ‘something like that?’ Miss Manners doubts that there is anything in the world like an elegantly dressed Bostonian lurching across the room and diving face first into a bowl of guacamole dip while simultaneously disengaging her bodice from her bosom.”

She elaborated to a reporter in a telephone interview: “My feeling was that’s exactly what to do! If something is outrageous enough and you have the grace to go with it, you are sometimes better off than if you attempt an extremely elaborate cover-up which doesn’t work.