Doctors’ Notes: Embarrassment
What's Up Docs?
BBC
4.4 • 659 Ratings
🗓️ 14 October 2025
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Chris and Xand continue their conversation about embarrassment with Dr Tiffany Watt Smith, a cultural historian interested in the histories of emotion and medicine.
They want to know: how power and hierarchical structures in your relationships affect your levels of embarrassment, and how embarrassment functions within the context of other emotions.
If you’d like to share your thoughts on this or any other topic covered on the podcast, you email us at whatsupdocs@bbc.co.uk or Whatsapp on 08000 665 123.
Presenters: Drs Chris and Xand van Tulleken Guest: Dr Tiffany Watt Smith Producer: Maia Miller-Lewis and Jo Rowntree Executive Producer: Rami Tzabar Editor: Kirsten Lass Researcher: Grace Revill Tech Lead: Reuben Huxtable Social Media: Leon Gower Digital Lead: Richard Berry Composer: Phoebe McFarlane Sound Design: Ruth Rainey
At the BBC: Assistant Commissioner: Greg Smith Commissioning Editor: Rhian Roberts
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:07.5 | It's like going into an ice path with your hands as the ice. |
| 0:10.8 | In 2025, we were here for the entertainment. |
| 0:13.8 | Ellis and John. |
| 0:14.9 | Have you not considered just coffee, which is what I do? |
| 0:17.6 | Sightracked with Annie and Nick. |
| 0:19.4 | Stevie Wonder, welcome. I'm pleasure. Loyal Carnar is with us. Want to hear all about Glastonbury. And Celebrity Traitors Uncloaked. Welcome to Uncloaked, Ireland. Oh, thanks for having me, Ed. The winner. I know, still hasn't sunk in. Get the best of 2025 with podcasts on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:42.8 | Hello, welcome to Doctor's Notes. I'm Dr Chris Van Tulligan and Zandi. |
| 0:44.8 | Explain what Doctor's Notes is. |
| 0:49.3 | It's a deeper dive into the science of the main topic from what's up docs each week. We get very excited speaking to our experts and so this allows us to share that extra content with you. |
| 0:57.8 | Zandi, we've just been recording with Dr. Tiffany Watsmith and she was quite an unusual guest |
| 1:03.4 | on WhatsApp Docs. She's a historian, but particularly she's a historian of emotions and she's |
| 1:08.4 | written an amazing book called The Book of Emotions. And do you think, |
| 1:11.3 | I sometimes think a lot of health and medicine is talked about in terms of, you know, we pose the |
| 1:17.3 | questions in scientific terms. That means we answer them with kind of quite hard, quantitative |
| 1:22.1 | answers sometimes. It feels very objective. And yet, your experience of being you is informed by all kinds of things. |
| 1:32.3 | The stories we tell about our bodies, our emotions, who we are and where we are. |
| 1:36.3 | When you experience an emotion, you're not just going, well, I'm a human having this human emotion, |
| 1:41.3 | and that's just how humans are. |
| 1:43.3 | You're a particular person at a |
| 1:45.7 | particular place at a particular time. And historians are much better at noticing that than doctors, |
| 1:51.6 | I think. Doctors would love to strap a blood pressure cuff on you and just go, oh, this is, |
... |
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