What is humiliation? What goes through our minds when we feel humiliated? Under what circumstances are we most likely to experience the emotion of humiliation? How does a humiliated person or group behave? How can we protect ourselves against the humiliations of which we are victims? The aim of our research group is to answer these and other similar questions. Underlying our research efforts is the issue of the “devalued self”, that is, the feeling that invades us when we internalize a negative and demeaned vision of ourselves or when we think we do not have the value we deserve as human beings. Our fundamental proposal is that humiliation is the emotion that arises when others unfairly force us to see ourselves as devalued. But how is it possible that, considering the devaluation that others impose on us is unfair, we internalize it, giving rise to humiliation? The complex cognitive-emotional process that underlies humiliation, which the moral philosopher Avishai Margalit referred to as “the paradox of humiliation”, concentrates a good part of our research efforts. As social psychologists, we seek the answers to these questions in the interaction of the person with their social context, and we do so from interpersonal and intergroup perspectives. We use a method fundamentally based on laboratory experimentation, with a strong cognitive orientation.

We are interested in a wide spectrum of topics related to the threatened and/or devalued self: social stigma; other moral emotions beyond humiliation, such as envy, shame or guilt, moral threat (feeling that others threaten the idea we have of ourselves as moral and ethical persons); and the reverse of humiliation, which would be the process that empowers victims, protecting their self-esteem and self-concept.