One purpose of this study was to determine if there were any differences in embarrassment between Chinese, Chinese American, and Caucasian American college students. A related purpose was to determine if there were any behavioral characteristics associated with embarrassment among the three groups. A total of 137 college students were given the Embarrassment Questionnaire (Modigliani, 1966) and the revised California Psychological Inventory (CPI; Gough, 1987). Three hypotheses were tested. The first: that there was no significant difference on the embarrassment questionnaire mean score between the three groups. The second: that there was no commonality in the kinds of embarrassing situations experienced by the three groups. The third: that there was no significant difference between the three groups in behavioral characteristics as measured by the CPI. The first hypothesis was tested using ANOVA. The three groups' mean scores on the embarrassment questionnaire were significantly different at the.05 level. The Chinese Americans were the least embarrassable. The Chinese were in the middle and the Caucasian Americans were the most embarrassable. This result may be related to how open or guarded the subjects were in responding to the questionnaire. The second hypothesis was tested using factor analysis. Because of the small sub-samples and the resulting factors accounting for 11% of the variance, it was concluded that there was no commonality in the kinds of embarrassing situations experienced by the three groups. With the third hypothesis ANOVA was used to test the significance of the differences between the three groups on the twenty scales of the revised CPI. The results suggest that the variance among the three groups was due to factors other than ethnicity.
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