Motivation and emotion/Book/2024/Humiliation

Humiliation:
What leads to it, what role does it play, and how can it be managed?

Overview

Figure 1 American soldier Sergeant Frederick humiliated an Iraqi detainee by chaining him to the cell wall during interrogation at Abu Ghraib prison.

Scenario

The Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse. In March 2004, U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq violated detainees' human rights, including physical and sexual abuse, torture, and rape.

The human rights violation done by the U.S. military in Abu Ghraib prison abuse (see Figure 1)^[1] deprived Iraq detainees fundamental entitlements to recognition as human beings. These rights are normalized by the rule of law, both internationally and domestically. It is publicly acknowledged that every individual has equal status in accessing human rights. This normative expectation was undermined by the U.S. Army through dehumanization of Iraq detainees, depriving them of public acknowledgement.

The term "humiliation" etymologically derives from the Latin humilatio, meaning the act of prostrating or being dragged in the ground, in the mud (humus) (Araya,2020). It is a highly intense emotion (Elison & Harter, 2007) that responds to public degradation of identity (Hartling & Luchetta, 1999) by the actions of others (Torres & Bergner, 2012).

The theoretical consensus on key features of humiliating event include: [Use a numbered list or bullet points as taught in Tutorial 02] 1. relational and interactive orientation (Klein, 1991; Miller, 1988); 2. public witnesses (Fernández,2023); 3. a perception of identity degradation (Hartling & Luchetta, 1999; Torres & Bergner, 2012); 4. the public degradation being an injustice (Hartling and Luchetta,1999).

Empirically, Jackson (1999) identified three characteristics of humiliation: {{ic|Use a numbered list or bullet points as taught in Tutorial 02} 1. the exposure of 'individuals' 'shortcomings or wrongdoings; 2. intentionality and publicity of the exposure; 3. perception of the exposure as unjust.

This chapter defines a humiliating stimulus as the unjust public degradation of social actors' identity. From a cognitive perspective on emotion, the chapter discusses the causes and responses of humiliation and its roles, while Gross emotion regulation theory will be used to explore strategies for humiliation management.

Focus questions:

What is humiliation?
What can cause emotional responses of humiliation?
What role does humiliation play in human functioning?
How can be humiliation be managed?

What is humiliation?

Research has often related shame, embarrassment and guilt with humiliation[factual?]. This chapter compares these four emotions based on their cognitive aspects. Cognitive appraisal distinguishes one emotion from another (Smith & Ellsworth, 1985). The comparison is made using the following ten dimensions: valence, attention, agency/coping, depth, certainty, goal, legitimacy, self-concept and responsibility (Smith & Ellsworth, 1985) (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Comparison Between Four Emotions [factual?]


	Humiliation	Shame	Embarrassment	Guilt
Valence	negative	negative	negative	negative
Activation	fight/undo damage by others; or flight/self-protection	flight/self-protection	flight/appease	fight/undo damage by self
Attentional activity	attention demanding	attention demanding	attention demanding	attention demanding
Control agency/coping potential	high agency when anger; low agency when fear	low agency	low agency	high agency
Depth	serious, profound	serious, profound	serious, profound	serious, profound
Certainty	unpredictable	unpredictable	unpredictable	unpredictable
Goal path obstacles/goal relevance	identity	self-worth	inappropriate social behaviours	unethical, immoral behaviours
Legitimacy	injustice	deserved	deserved	deserved
Norm/Self-concept compatibility	incompatible; self being devalued	incompatible; self being inferior and unworthy	incompatible; self making an unintended social mistake	incompatible; self's behaviours harming others
Responsibility	external attribution/blame others	internal attribution/self-blame	internal attribution/self-blame	internal attribution/self-blame

Humiliation shares a few similar cognitive dimensions with shame, embarrassment and guilt, yet differs in others regarding legitimacy, norm/self-concept compatibility and responsibility[factual?].

Conceptually, this chapter refers to humiliation as an intense self-conscious negative emotion arising from cognitive appraisal of unjust public degradation of identity (Hartling & Luchetta, 1999; Klein, 1991; Jackson, 1999) by other social actors.

The causes of humiliation

Emotional responses and roles

Studies that focus on emotional responses of humiliation are rare, and few have examined the functions of these responses in human life. Insights can be drawn from research findings relevant to the experience of humiliation.

Emotional responses of humiliation

Cognitive appraisal determinates emotional effects (Lazarus, 1991). The triggered emotional responses consists of physiological arousal, subjective feelings and behavioral expressions. They serve the human functioning in the environment.

Physiological arousal

Unjust public devaluation of identity threats social-self, causing increased attention and cortical activities, more intense than happiness or anger (Dickerson,2004; Otten & Jonas, 2014). It also activates hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, triggering fight-or-flight responses (Otten & Jonas 2014).

Social threat may cause a sense of social exclusion, leading to decreased cognitive functioning and difficulty to control impulse (Otten & Jonas, 2013), correlating with flight-or-flight responses. Ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) may activate during negative emotion and social cognition (Hiser & Koenigs, 2018); however, research has not directly studied the relationship between vmPFC and humiliation[grammar?].

Threats to social status can raise blood pressure (Scheepers & Ellemers, 2005), signaling a fight-or- flight response (Curtis & O'Keefe, 2002). Humiliation associated with social pain may also activate the insular cortex (Masten et al., 2011), though, this connection has not been examined.

Case study

Christ faced humiliation in many forms: rejection by his people, shame for miracles, mockery by the Roman soldiers, and ridicule during crucifixion.

Behavioral expressions

Physiological arousal in response to humiliating stimuli indicates the activation of fight-or-flight responses. The responding behaviors are aggression (fight) and avoidance (flight) (Fernández et al., 2015; Miller, 1993).

Aggression

Revenge is a common response to humiliation, shown as school shooting (Harrison & Bowers, 2010; Harter et al., 2003; Leary et al., 2003), homicide (Hale, 1994; Lindner, 2006; Miller, 1993), war (Lindner, 2006), terrorism (Lindner, 2001) and genocide (Lindner, 2009).Retaliation may target the perpetrators or public (Harter et al., 2003). Social tensions and violence (Klein, 1991) reflect the fight response.

Avoidance

Social avoidance or withdrawal is a common response of humiliation (Harter et al., 2003; ) and can increase risk of depression (Brown et al., 1995; Farmer and McGuffin, 2003; Kendler et al., 2003), and other mental illness (Klein, 1991), such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), in severe cases, suicide (Torres & Bergner, 2010). These behaviors reflect the flight response.

Subjective feelings

Aggression signals an urge to remove obstacles, indicating anger (Berkowitz, 1990). Humiliation associated violence reflects this anger. However, angry individuals may refrain from acting out due to limited resources, environmental constrains, personal standard (Novaco, 1976) or fear (Stemmler, et al., 2001).

Avoidance or withdrawal indicates self-protection, which reflects an urge arising from fear (Maddux & Rogers, 1983). However, individuals may also fight back due to limited escaping routes (Blanchard & Blanchard, 1990).

Anger

Blanchard and Pearson (2018) stated [grammar?] anger arises from appraising obstacles to goals and disputed resources (Lerner & Tiedens, 2006). Identity and the associated social status are personal resources in many societies (Fiske et al., 2016), and being "right" or "rights" to oneself (Jones, 1999), essential for one's relationship with the environment (Hauge, 2007). Appraisal of these "resources" being taken away generates anger.

Fear

Fear prominently arises from appraisal of physical threat (Blanchard &Pearson, 2018), associated with feeling of powerless. Humiliating situations may also involve physical threats, assaults, or torture (e.g., see Figure 1). Additionally, identity threat and social exclusion may be perceived as physically unsafe, due to the shared neural underpinnings of physical and social pain (Eisenberger, 2012). However, research has not examined these neural underpinnings in relation to humiliation.

Humiliation: the roles of adaptation

Emotion itself is an adaptive mechanism for human survival in the environment (Lazarus, 1968). From evolutionary and cognitive appraisal perspective, humiliation serves as an adaptive mechanism.

The evolutionary perspective

Evolutionary theory posits that emotional responses help overcome environmental challenges and enhance reproductive opportunities (Blanchard & Pearson, 2018), hence, the ability to experience emotions is adaptive (Nesse 1990). Emotions direct attention to environmental information (Yiend, 2010) and motivate survival behaviours (Buck, 1985). This evolutionary view applies particularly well in understanding negative emotions (Blanchard & Pearson, 2018, p151).

Survival

The act to remove obstacles to deprived social status or withdraw for self-protection reflect anger and fear. Both emotional responses are adaptive function that maximize survival chances.

Emotions shape perception and memory (Laird et al.,1982), as seen in fear conditioning (LeDoux, 1993; Öhman & Mineka 2001). Future cues—like specific places, smells, or people—may trigger similar feelings (LeDoux, 1994). Past experience of humiliation helps individuals learn threat cues, offering an evolutionary advantage for protection against future humiliation.

Individual-society relationship

Darwin (1872/1998) noted the communicative functions of emotional expressions in conveying needs among social members. Lazarus (1968) viewed emotional responses as adaptive mechanisms in controlling the organism-environment relationship. Emotional responses of humiliation help individual inform a society that has thwarted their relational needs,[grammar?] Rejection of this fundamental need to human motivation (Baumeister & Leary, 1995) leads to profound social pain (Miller, 1988).

Perpetrators or the public may feel guilt upon recognizing the emotional expressions of the humiliated and wish to make amends (Tangney et al., 2007). For example, humiliation in Iraq drew global attention, leading to human rights improvements (Mokhtari, 2009). Reports of humiliation in medical settings prompted actions to improve patient experience (Svindsth et al., 2013), and reconciliation has taken place to address the humiliation of Indigenous Australians (McMillan & Rigney, 2020).

Cognitive appraisal and adaptation

The adaptive mechanisms of emotions in survival and individual-social relationships can become dysfunctional due to misinterpretation of stimuli or emotional intensity (Keltner & Kring, 1998). Accurate perception and regulating emotion intensity depend on cognitive appraisal (Smith & Ellsworth, 1985).

Primary appraisal

Individuals with ordinary mental states and personality traits exhibit typical a cognitive appraisal (Smith & Ellsworth, 1985) of humiliating stimuli, as these stimuli are socially normative and easily recognizable within the same sociocultural context (Lazarus, 1991; Smith & Lazarus, 1990).

Whereas individuals with depression and grandiose narcissism may have faulty perception and misinterpret normal stimuli as humiliating (Alberto et al., 2014; Roche et al., 2013)[grammar?]. Their preexisting dysfunctional emotional system (Miller et al.,2011) render humiliation a maladaptive mechanism, similar to other emotions.

Secondary appraisal

Secondary appraisal and reappraisal influence emotional intensity (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Highly intense emotions override individuals' executive function, which impairs their ability to choose alternative responses or evaluate consequences. They are prone to violence, substance abuse, self-injurious behaviour (Keltner & Kring, 1998).

Humiliation, the strongest negative emotion (Lindner, 2003), serves as an adaptive mechanism, when associated anger and fighting are expressed appropriately in a given sociocultural context. However, if mass killing is appraised as the best coping strategy, anger and fight becomes maladaptive emotional responses.

Humiliation associated fear and avoidance may serve individuals as self-protection. However, if individuals cannot unpair their initial appraisal from the stimuli or responses, they may develop mental disorders. Fear and avoidance become maladaptive. Regulating humiliation intensity through cognitive reappraisal therefore is key to maintain its functions as adaptive mechanisms.

Case Study

When Gandhi arrived in South Africa, he was denied seating with European passengers because of his skin color and heritage. He refused to comply and got beaten, kicked into a gutter, and thrown off a train for insisting on staying in first class. On another occasion, a police officer abruptly removed him from a public footpath. Finding this treatment humiliating and inhumane, Gandhi who was initially uninterested in politics, decided to fight for rights.

Quiz

Humiliation management

Current research has not addressed humiliation management, focusing instead on solving it as a social, political, and cultural issue (Kramer, 2006). The management of humiliation as an emotion is discussed here through the lens of emotion regulation (Gross, 1998), using the process model of emotion regulation (Gross, 1998) as a framework.

What is humiliation management?

The adaptation mechanism of emotion can become maladaptive due to high intensity (Dixon-Gordon et al., 2015; Lazarus, 1968). Healthy individuals prefer using distraction to disengage from negative emotions (Sheppes et al., 2011). However, such flexibility can diminish. When disengagement fails (Kashdan & Rottenberg, 2010), individuals may adopt inappropriate coping strategies. The need to manage humiliation then arises for regulating emotional intensity.

Some research views regulating emotional intensity as simply "dampening" it (Aldao et al., 2010). This chapter argues that the goal is to optimize emotional adaptability through effective coping strategies. It defines humiliation management as the process of regulating humiliation intensity for optimal coping and adaptation.

Cognitive change: the process model of emotion regulation

The process model of emotion regulation is the most widely used framework for deriving emotion regulation strategies(Webb et al., 2012; Gross, 1998). It has five components: situation selection, situation modification, attention deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation (Webb et al., 2012; Gross, 1998). Cognitive change is the stage where individuals start to engage in processing emotional information that has not been filtered through the first three components. Cognitive reappraisal, a type of cognitive change, determines emotional intensity (Blanchard & Pearson, 2008). It focuses on changing the sensory input of the stimuli (Gross, 1998), through either primary appraisal (reappraising meaning) or secondary appraisal (reappraising coping capacity) (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984).

Cognitive reappraisal: the effectiveness of a bidirectional mechanism

Effective cognitive reappraisal increases activation in lateral prefrontal regions associated with cognitive control, while simultaneously decreasing activation in the amygdala and medial orbitofrontal cortex (Ochsner et al., 2002). Buhle et al. (2014) found that decreased amygdala activity results from altered semantic representations of emotional stimuli in the prefrontal cortex, influenced by cognitive appraisal. Mcrea et al. (2012) found that when facing negative emotional stimuli, activation in amygdala and insula activities can be reduced effectively by cognitive appraisal, when the goal is to decrease negative affects instead of increasing positive affects.

Empirical research shows that cognitive reappraisal effectively regulate emotional intensity through a bidirectional mechanism (Ochsner et al., 2002), activating the prefrontal cortex while simultaneously deactivating amygdala. Mindfulness has been identified as a cognitive reappraisal technique for its similar function of activating the prefrontal cortex while simultaneously deactivating amygdala (Brown et al., 2003; Way et al., 2010).

Mindfulness: a bidirectional model

Mindfulness encompasses a broad range of concepts and techniques but is not inherently used as a bidirectional mechanism. Some studies used it as a top-down or bottom-up mechanism (Chiesa et al., 2013). This chapter suggests identifying specific techniques and their specific application that enable mindfulness to function as cognitive reappraisal--regulating emotional intensity through a bidirectional mechanism.

Defining mindfulness

Four perspectives on defining mindfulness can be summarized from current research: [Use a numbered list or bullet points as taught in Tutorial 02] 1 ) a set of techniques for non-evaluative observation (Liija et al., 2013); 2 ) a measurable mental ability to pay attention (Shaprio, 2009), using Brown and Ryan (2003) Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale; 3) an act of seeking novel information relevant to the present situation (Langer, 2000); and 4) a set of techniques that induce relaxation response (Sevinc et al., 2018).

These four perspectives highlight key qualities of mindfulness: non-evaluative observation, attentiveness, novelty-seeking, and relaxation. Accordingly, mindfulness can be defined as a process of non-evaluative observation during novelty seeking, with attentiveness and relaxation response.

A preliminary hypothesis

Novel information captures attention (Escera et al., 1998) and activates amygdala (Blackford, 2010). However, the relaxation response mitigates the flight-or-flight response (Jacobs, 2001), while non-evaluative observation leads to a neutral interpretation of novel information (Hofmann et al., 2010). Novelty also stimulates cognitive function and context-appropriate problem-solving (Larger & Moldoveanu, 2000). Organisms with a reduced fight-or- flight response, can experience emotions while coping with situational-appropriate strategies.

An experiment can be designed to test the efficacy of mindfulness in managing humiliation. Participants will be in a mindfulness session incorporating techniques that implement the four key qualities: non-evaluative observation, attentiveness, novelty-seeking, and relaxation. During the session, participants will be exposed to a strong negative emotional stimulus, such as a humiliating event. Neural activities in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala will be measured.

The hypothesis is that the prefrontal cortex regions will activate, while the amygdala will deactivate simultaneously. No flight-or-flight response will be observed; instead, a relaxation response will occur. This may illustrate that mindfulness functions similarly to cognitive reappraisal in regulating emotional intensity through bidirectionally during humiliation management.

Conclusion

This chapter framed the antecedent of humiliation in the context of unjust public degradation of identity. Unlike other emotional stimuli, the antecedent of humiliation has a cognitive element tied to a socio-cultural frame of reference, indicating a breach of social agreement on the treatment each social agency deserves. Its unique cognitive appraisal causes emotional responses of humiliation and distinguishes it from other negative, self-conscious emotions, such as shame, guilt and embarrassment. However, cognitive appraisal shifts over time, allowing changes between emotions (Clore & Ortony, 2000). This raises the question for future research of whether multiple appraisals and discrete emotions can coexist at a single point of time of sensory input.

Emotional responses of humiliation include physiological arousal, behavioral expressions and subjective feelings. The cortical region and limbic system, particularly in areas linked to threat and stress, will activate, resulting in a fight-or-flight response. Correspondingly, aggression and avoidance are common behavioral expressions of humiliation, which may contribute to terrorism and mental disorders. Anger and fear were involved, reacting to the perceived injustice, threat and danger.

However, researchers mentioned shame, guilt or embarrassment may also emerge. Due to the limited time and scope, this chapter did not explore how shame, guilt or embarrassment, as discrete, self-conscious emotions, may also manifest as subjective feelings of humiliation.

The emotional responses of humiliation serve as adaptive mechanisms in humans' functioning, enhancing chances of survival, controlling in relations with the environment, and facilitating social communication. Cognitive appraisal determines perception and coping strategies, making emotions either adaptive or maladaptive.

The need to manage humiliation arises when emotion becomes maladaptive and results in inappropriate coping. Humiliation management aims to regulate emotional intensity through cognitive reappraisal at the stage of cognitive change in the process model of emotional regulation. This chapter specifically examined the potential of mindfulness as a cognitive appraisal strategy and its bidirectional effects on emotional regulation. A preliminary hypothesis was proposed for testing efficacy of mindfulness as a bidirectional model in humiliation management.

An additional perspective not covered in the chapter is that non-violent collective action, such as Gandhi's approach (Khanna, 2003), may be recognized as an alternative coping strategy to violence or avoidance, an outcome from humiliation management. Notably, Gandhi's non-violence and truthfulness in advocating for social status reflect two principles of yoga--Ahimsa and Satya, which has a close relationship with Buddhist mindfulness (Chandel, 2014).

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External links

[1] "Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse". Wikipedia. 2024-09-25. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisoner_abuse#/media/File:Abu_Ghraib_23.jpg.

[2] "Valerian (emperor)". Wikipedia. 2024-09-09. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerian_(emperor).

[1]

[2]

	Initiating a war with South Africa
	Developing PTSD
	Leading social movements against racism
	Starved himself to death