Despite the wealth of theoretical claims about the emotion of humiliation and its effect on human relations, there has been a lack of empirical research investigating what it means to experience humiliation. We studied the affective characteristics of humiliation, comparing the emotional experience of intergroup humiliation to two other emotions humiliation is often confused with: anger and sha...

BACKGROUND There is a lack of empirical studies of patients' level of humiliation during the hospital admission process and its implications for the clinical setting. We wanted to explore associations between self-rated humiliation and socio-demography and psychopathology in relation to admission to a psychiatric emergency unit. METHODS Consecutively admitted patients (N = 186) were interview...

Humiliation is often cited in attempts to understand the origins of asymmetric conflicts, especially conflicts involving terrorism. This article reviews common usage, expert opinion, and experiences in interpersonal and intergroup conflicts to suggest a construct definition of humiliation as a combination of anger and shame. Following appraisal theory, this definition distinguishes between the ...

Patients are at high risk for experiencing shame and humiliation in any medical encounter. This is because they commonly perceive diseases as defects, inadequacies, or shortcomings; while the visit to the hospital and the doctor's office requires physical and psychological exposure. Patients respond to the suffering of shame and humiliation by avoiding the physician, withholding information, co...

In personal accounts, humiliation is often reported as a very intense, painful, negative emotion. We report two scenario studies in which we explored two factors that may contribute to the intense character of humiliation: (1) unwanted, negative public exposure, and (2) a threat to central aspects of one's identity. Study 1 (N = 115) assessed emotional reactions to a public insult when an audie...

Childhood sexual abuse (CSA) may produce powerful and enduring emotion reactions, including intense shame, anger, and humiliation. Whereas shame and anger have received considerable interest from researchers, less attention has been paid to humiliation or associated coherence among these emotions as it relates to the psychological adjustment in CSA survivors. In the current investigation, the a...

The author identifies acts of humiliation as a specific and often traumatic way of exercising power, with a set of consistently occurring elements and predictable consequences, including a loss of the ability to trust others. It is argued that these consequences are serious and long-lasting. The article makes a distinction between 'shame' as a state of mind and 'humiliation' as an act perpetrat...