Moisture about gives long sight perhaps

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Individuals often wish to conceal their internal states. Anxiety over approaching a potential romantic partner, feelings of disgust over a disagreeable entrée served at a dinner party, or nervousness over delivering a public speech—all are internal states one may wish, for a variety of reasons, to keep private.

Research suggests that individuals are typically better at disguising their internal states than they believe—i.e., people are prone to an illusion of transparency, or a belief that their thoughts, feelings, and emotions are more apparent to others than is actually the case.

This illusion derives from the difficulty people have in getting beyond their own phenomenological experience when attempting to determine how they appear to others. The adjustment one makes from the ‘‘anchor’’ of one’s own phenomenology, like adjustments to anchors generally, tends to be insufficient. As a result, people exaggerate the extent to which their internal states ‘‘leak out’’ and overestimate the extent to which others can detect their private feelings. […]

As Miller and McFarland (1991) note, “in anxiety-provoking situations, it is often very difficult for people to believe that, despite feeling highly nervous, they do not appear highly nervous.” […]

[T]he realization that one’s nervousness is less apparent than one thinks may be useful in alleviating speech anxiety: If individuals can be convinced that their internal sensations are not manifested in their external appearance, one source of their anxiety can be attenuated, allowing them to relax and even improving the quality of their performance. Thus, speakers who know about the illusion of transparency may tend to give better speeches than speakers who do not.

{ Journal of Experimental Social Psychology | PDF }

burnt photograph glued to mirror { Douglas Gordon, Self-portrait of You + Me (Halle Berry), 2006 }