The Collaborative International Dictionary
Self-consciousness \Self`-con"scious*ness\, n. The quality or state of being self-conscious.
Wiktionary
n. 1 The awareness of the self as an entity. 2 shyness. A feeling of unease in social situations.
WordNet
n. embarrassment deriving from the feeling that others are critically aware of you [syn: uneasiness, uncomfortableness]
self-awareness plus the additional realization that others are similarly aware of you [ant: unselfconsciousness]
Wikipedia
Self-consciousness is an acute sense of self-awareness. It is a preoccupation with oneself, as opposed to the philosophical state of self-awareness, which is the awareness that one exists as an individual being; although some writers use both terms interchangeably or synonymously. An unpleasant feeling of self-consciousness may occur when one realizes that one is being watched or observed, the feeling that "everyone is looking" at oneself. Some people are habitually more self-conscious than others. Unpleasant feelings of self-consciousness are sometimes associated with shyness or paranoia.
Self-consciousness in the Upanishads is not the first-person indexical self-awareness or the self-awareness which is self-reference without identification, and also not the self-consciousness which as a kind of desire is satisfied by another self-consciousness. It is Self-realisation; the realisation of the Self consisting of consciousness that leads all else.
Usage examples of "self-consciousness".
Contrasted with the particularistic uprising of 1477 it evinced the enormous growth, in the intervening century, of a national self-consciousness in the Seventeen Provinces.
It is this vein of poetry which awoke Italy to self-consciousness, made her in a few years forget the nightmare of Catharist ideas, and rescued her from pessimism.
I asked myself, that the Orwellian message stated in the opening paragraph of this review was buried in the script of X-Men, that some capybara-skin-booted, Hugo-Boss-clad producer had this much clever self-consciousness?
Judging from the records of early writers, when Medicine began to struggle toward self-consciousness, it was again the same order of facts that was singled out by the attention.
Such duplicity shifts dominance in satire from the basic triad to literary self-consciousness.
Still, as expected of him, he stepped in as head of the family, and as time passed, those expressions of self-doubt, the fits of despair and self-consciousness that had so characterized the outpourings in his diary, grew fewer.
Drake, and, at the sound of the famous fictional movie line echoing in the relevant air of this real place, they both laughed, the levels of self-consciousness attendant upon a contemporary journey like this were positively Piranesian in number and involution, the pertinent dialogue had already been spoken, the images already photographed, the unsullied, unscripted experience was practically extinct, and you were left to wander at best through a familiar maze of distorting mirrors -- unless somewhere up ahead the living coils of this river carried one down and out of the fun house.
Her whole plump countenance beams with satisfaction and contentment from under her well-starched checked turban, bearing on it, however, if we must confess it, a little of that tinge of self-consciousness which becomes the first cook of the neighborhood, as Aunt Chloe was universally held and acknowledged to be.
This being done, it was to be my part to care for the child with the magisterium which was known to me, and as soon as it had attained to its third year Madame d'Urfe would begin to recover her self-consciousness, and then I was to begin to initiate her in the perfect knowledge of the Great Work.
High-level self-consciousness is probably what set the Moderns apart from the Archaics, and led them ultimately to dominance.
He and Blix had lived through two months of rarest, most untroubled happiness, with hardly more self-consciousness than two young and healthy boys.
Lessa bent to peer at Jaxom who politely looked at her, chewing with sudden self-consciousness.
Finally, the pressure of suffering created by this apparent dysfunction forces consciousness to disidentify from form and awakens it from its dream of form: It regains self-consciousness, but it is at a far deeper level than when it lost it.
At any moment, Beatty might rise and walk about him, touching, exploring his guilt and self-consciousness.
The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent.