An analysis of all tweets sent in the United States from June 2015 to December 2017 found that there’s been a 45 percent increase in tweets about embarrassment since January 2017, when Trump took office. And when there is a spike in people tweeting about feeling embarrassed, it is often because they are talking about Trump, says the study, which was published on Wednesday in the journal Frontiers in Communication. On days when there were a lot of embarrassment-related tweets, 20 to 35 percent of them mentioned Trump’s name.

Part of the increase might simply be due to the tendency to say you’re “embarrassed” by someone when in reality you’re just “disappointed” and want to voice that disappointment strongly. This was borne out in the times the researchers found Americans were most “embarrassed” by the president. Along with a spike in cringeworthiness during the Merkel meeting, for instance, the researchers noted an uptick on May 25, 2017, when Trump appeared to shove Montenegro Prime Minister Dusko Markovic at a NATO Summit, as though attempting to get in front of him. (The White House claimed Trump was just getting to a predetermined photo-op spot, and Markovic shrugged it off.) Other embarrassment peaks occurred after Trump praised “fine people on both sides” after white nationalists marched on Charlottesville, and after he withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change.

“We found that people felt the need to share their emotions related to Donald Trump’s politics,” said Sören Krach, a professor of social neuroscience at Lübeck University and a co-author of the study, in a statement, “and embarrassment was the emotion that most clearly described what people felt.”

It wasn’t just embarrassment that was significantly associated with mentioning Trump’s name in a tweet. Disgust, shame, and anger were also positively correlated with the word Trump, while happiness was negatively correlated. In other words, “If someone’s saying, ‘I’m so happy today,’ odds are Trump is not associated,” Dar Meshi, an assistant professor of advertising and public relations at Michigan State University and a co-author of the study, told me.

These results must be taken with a grain of salt. Twitter is far from representative of the American public as a whole. During the time this study was conducted, 60 percent of Americans did say in a Marist poll that they were “embarrassed” by the president. But Twitter tends to be both more liberal and more negative than the general population, so a conservative president doing inappropriate things is perfect grist for the Twitter mill. Today, 42 percent of Americans continue to approve of Trump’s performance. Since Twitter only launched in 2006, it wasn’t nearly as big during the end of the George W. Bush administration, the last Republican presidency we have to compare it with.