HumilIATION

Humiliation is a psychosocial phenomenon with profound implications in interpersonal and group relationships, and with serious consequences, such as violence, suicidal ideation and depression. Despite the relevance that humiliation has for people's psychological well-being and for the fluidity and quality of interpersonal and group relationships, the accumulated research on this topic remains surprisingly scarce.

Humiliation can be conceptualized as an emotion (feeling humiliated) and as an action (humiliating someone or being humiliated by someone).

As an action, humiliation has been defined as "the forced devaluation of a person or group through a process of subjugation that undermines dignity" (Lindner, 2006, p. xiv).

As an emotion, humiliation is defined as a particularly intense and negative self-conscious emotion that a person or group experiences when they are unfairly devalued, ridiculed or despised. Self-conscious emotions are characterized by being especially complex from the cognitive point of view since they require self-awareness and the capacity for self-representation. Compared to the so-called basic emotions (such as anger, joy, surprise, fear, and sadness), self-conscious emotions arise later in development, do not have a discreet and universally recognizable facial expression, and maintain a higher degree of intercultural variability. Research on self-conscious emotions has normally focused on the study of shame, embarrassment, guilt, and pride; only recently we are beginning to consider humiliation as a distinctive self-conscious emotion in works that try to identify which specific evaluations, experiences and circumstances are key to trigger humiliation instead of other closely related emotions, such as shame and anger (Fernández, 2014; Fernández et al., 2015, 2018).

Among the situational variables that could foster humiliation of the victim, our group investigates the role of hostility, the status of the perpetrator with respect to the victim, whether the humiliating action occurs in public or private, whether it is a chronic or punctual event or is carried out by a group or a single individual, etc (Fernández et al., 2018, 2022, 2023). Among the personal aspects involved, we analyze the role played by the concrete aspect of the victim's ego that is unfairly devalued (individual, relational or collective; agentic or communal).