Welcome back to the savvy psychologist. I'm Dr. Ellen Hendrickson and every week I'll help you meet life's challenges with evidence-based research, a sympathetic ear, and zero judgment.

Okay, this week we will talk about social awkwardness with journalist and author Melissa Dahl. Now usually awkwardness gets thrown around as a trait as part of our personalities, as in

I hate parties because I'm so awkward or I have a hard time meeting people

because I'm awkward but Melissa looks at awkwardness in a different way as an emotion. And that is a feeling we can all relate to. It's the

emotion we feel whenever we cringe, recoil, or shudder. So for example, we feel it when we remember something humiliating from our past. or

Shutter. For example, we feel it when we remember something humiliating from our past, or from hearing our own voice on a voicemail,

or when watching pretty much anything involving Larry David.

So Melissa Dahl is a senior editor at New York Magazine's The Cut,

where she covers health and psychology.

And in 2014, she helped launch Science of Us, New York magazine's popular social science vertical.

Her new book, which we'll talk about today, is Cringeworthy, a theory of awkwardness.

And I have to say, it is excellent and quite useful as we will discuss.

So, Melissa, welcome to the show.

Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, no, I'm excited to talk to you.

So like I said, so your book is called

cringe-worthy, a theory of awkwardness.

So let's define those two terms.

So what is awkwardness?

What is cringing, and how are they connected?

Yeah, I was thinking about this. So I think that if I want to kind of differentiate between the two,

I think about awkwardness as maybe like an atmospheric condition you know if that makes sense you

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