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An online survey conducted in Poland found that people who reported more humiliation, including both past humiliating experiences and fear of being humiliated in the future, tended to be less happy and more prone to rumination. Statistical analyses suggested that rumination partly accounted for the link between humiliation and lower happiness. The paper was published in Current Issues in Personality Psychology.
Humiliation is a distressing experience that can leave vivid, lasting memories and negatively affect how people see themselves and their relationships with others. It has been linked to lower self-esteem, impaired concentration, disrupted relationships, emotional distress, and depression, and dwelling on humiliating experiences may even motivate aggressive behavior.
A related psychological phenomenon is rumination, which involves repetitive negative thinking about distressing experiences, personal concerns, and fears. Rumination can prolong and intensify negative emotions, interfere with cognitive functioning, and make it more difficult to recover from upsetting experiences.
Both humiliation and rumination may reduce a person’s happiness, understood here as overall well-being and satisfaction with one’s life. Humiliation and rumination may also interfere with posttraumatic growth, a process through which individuals experience positive psychological changes following adversity.
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Study authors Natalia Cichecka and Sonia Antosz of SWPS University in Katowice and Aleksandra Żenda of the University of Silesia examined the relationships between humiliation, rumination, and happiness. They also investigated whether rumination might help explain the link between humiliation and happiness.
The researchers conducted an online survey distributed through social media. Participants were 323 adults from Poland, including 212 women, 107 men, and four people who identified as another gender. Their ages ranged from 18 to 79, with an average age of 26, and about half (49%) had a higher education.
Participants completed assessments of happiness (the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire), rumination (the Perseverative Thinking Questionnaire), and humiliation (the Humiliation Inventory). The Humiliation Inventory measures two aspects of humiliation: past experiences of being humiliated and fear of future humiliation. The rumination questionnaire assessed a general tendency toward repetitive negative thinking rather than rumination about humiliating events specifically.
Results showed that participants who reported more humiliation tended to be less happy and more prone to rumination. Fear of future humiliation was slightly more strongly linked to lower happiness than past experiences of humiliation. People more prone to rumination also tended to be less happy, especially those who viewed their repetitive thinking as unproductive.
Statistical analyses indicated that rumination partially mediated the relationship between humiliation and happiness. In other words, people who reported more humiliation tended to ruminate more, and greater rumination was in turn associated with lower happiness. However, this pathway through rumination accounted for only part of the association, and humiliation remained strongly linked to lower happiness even after rumination was taken into account.
“The results suggest that feelings of humiliation may have a devastating effect on stated happiness through rumination about difficult experiences and fear of future humiliation. Knowledge of the role of rumination and humiliation in perceived happiness may help in diagnosis and treatment, especially of anxiety and affective disorders,” the study authors concluded.
The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the links between humiliation and happiness. However, it should be noted that the design of this study does not allow any causal inferences to be derived from the results, and because all measures were collected at a single time point, the analyses cannot establish that humiliation led to rumination, which then reduced happiness. Additionally, all the data were collected using self-reports, leaving room for reporting bias to have affected the results. The sample was also recruited through social media and was mostly young and female, so the findings may not generalize to the broader population.
The paper, “I can’t stop thinking about it: The mediating role of rumination in the relationship between humiliation and happiness,” was authored by Natalia Cichecka, Sonia Antosz, and Aleksandra Żenda.
