Humiliation in context: Interactional, emotional, and self-related processes

Abstract

To examine how people perceive and experience humiliation, we analysed 2635 narratives from 1048 participants, capturing definitions of humiliation and accounts of humiliating situations. The findings reveal that humiliation is perceived as both an interactive event and an emotional resolution process, that the impact on the self (whether individual or collective) depends on whether humiliation is experienced personally or vicariously; and that agency-related devaluations were more prevalent than communion-related devaluations in both defining humiliation and recalling personally humiliating situations. In an attempt to capture the variety of definitions of humiliation and recollections of humiliating situations as interactive experiences involving emotional and behavioural resolution processes, we propose (drawing on self-discrepancy theory) that humiliation can be conceptualised as the experience of a discrepancy between a person’s actual/other self-concept (i.e. how they believe significant others perceive them) and their actual/own self-concept (i.e. how they perceive themselves). We argue that this conceptualisation holds significant potential not only to capture the diverse nature of humiliation experiences but also to contribute to ongoing efforts to deepen our understanding of the underlying psychological processes.