Abstract
BACKGROUND:
One reaction to injustice or humiliation is embitterment, a disabling emotion, which can hinder the pursuit of functional solutions for problems in life. Unemployment can be experienced differently, depending on the subjective appraisal of the cause, how a person came to being laid off, the consequences, and especially feelings of injustice.
OBJECTIVE:
The goal of this study is to explore the frequency and correlates of embitterment in unemployed persons in contrast to general psychological distress.
METHODS:
Self rating on the Posttraumatic Embitterment Scale (PTED scale), the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28) and a survey on the unemployment status of 102 randomly selected persons who were waiting in a German unemployment agency office.
RESULTS:
A score of ≥6 on the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28) was found in 40.2% of the sample, indicating severe psychological distress. Unemployment was seen as a severe, or very severe burden by 56% of participants, and judged as unjust by 40% of participants. An elevated score above 2 on the Posttraumatic Embitterment Scale was found in 25.5% participants. Appraisal and duration of unemployment, feelings of injustice, and age were related to embitterment, but not psychological distress.
CONCLUSIONS:
Embitterment is a destructive emotion in reaction to unemployment, which can impair functional coping.
Introduction
Job loss is a negative life event, which ranks in the upper quartile of unpleasant events that generate life stress [1]. Unemployed persons have in general poorer health than employed persons, and have been found to suffer from more psychological distress or mental illnesses [2–4]. How a person reacts to job loss and unemployment will be moderated by the duration of unemployment, personality, age, economic situation, and consequences of job loss, like financial problems, or negative reactions of the family [5–7]. Also important is the subjective appraisal and the cause of unemployment [8–10]. Major distress is often associated with feelings of injustice. Empirical evidence suggests that persons who felt that they had been treated unfairly or been let down show the most psychological distress [11–13].
A possible emotional consequence of injustice, humiliation, and breach of trust is embitterment [12, 14– 16]. Everybody has experienced this emotional state to some extent. In greater intensity it is associated with feelings of despair, hopelessness, negative mood in general, psychosomatic problems, but also hate, anger, and fantasies of aggression. Psychoanalyists have described embitterment as aggression by self-destruction [17]. Embitterment is an emotion that is not controlled by self-regulation. It is a destructive emotion, which hinders functional problem solving as individuals become locked into a state of resentment [12, 19]. Embitterment has been found to play a role in work related injustice [20–23].
As unemployment is sometimes related to feelings of injustice, elevated levels of embitterment are to be expected [24–31]. To our knowledge there is no research on this topic. We explored the prevalence and correlates of embitterment and unemployment to determine to what degree embitterment, apart from general psychological distress, plays a role in handling unemployment.
Method
Participants
Persons in the waiting room of an office of the German national employment agency were asked to anonymously fill in a paper pencil questionnaire to support research on psychological consequences of unemployment. Of 102 participants 41% were female, the mean age was 36.6 years (range = 19– 61 years, SD 12.07), 63.8% were unmarried or divorced, 17.6% had a high school education, duration of unemployment was longer than one year in 32.4% of participants, and 49.0% had been unemployed more than once.
Measures
Psychological distress
The 28-item version of the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-28) was used as a measure of global psychological distress [32]. This scale is used internationally and provides a global score and subscores for depression, anxiety, somatisation, and social dysfunction. Reaching a threshold of ≥6 on the GHQ-28 indicates a significant psychological problem.
Reactive embitterment
A modified version of the Posttraumatic Embitterment Disorder Self-Rating Scale (PTED Scale) [33], which is available in many languages, was used to assess reactive embitterment in connection to job termination and unemployment. This 19-item self-rating scale starts with the instruction “Loosing my job is an event⋯”, followed by statements such as “⋯ that hurt my feelings and caused considerable embitterment”. The scale ranges from (0) “not true at all” to (4) “extremely true”. A mean total score ≥2 on the PTED Scale indicates a clinically significant intensity of reactive embitterment.
Unemployment appraisal
Global appraisal of unemployment was rated on a 6-point scale from 1 = “positive event”, to 2 = “no burden”, 3 = “some burden”, 4 = “significant burden”, 5 = “severe burden”, and 6 = “very severe burden.”
Feelings of injustice
In the PTED scale there is an item: “Loosing my job is an event that I see as very unjust and unfair”. This is taken as a global assessment and proxy for feelings of injustice.
The study was reviewed and approved by the scientific commission at the Chair of Psychology of the Faculty of Human Sciences of the University of Potsdam.
Results
Unemployment appraisal
The present unemployment was seen as positive by 10.8% of the participants. It was no burden for 11.8%, some burden for 16.7%, a significant burden for 12.8%, a severe burden for 26.5%, and a very severe burden for 16.7% (missing: 4.9%). This reflects a mean total score of 3.87 (SD = 1.6) on the unemployment appraisal. Unemployment was on average seen as a significant burden. There were no gender differences (t (95) = – 0.115, p = 0.909).
When asked about feelings of injustice, 32% of the participants reported “not at all”, 8% “hardly true”, 21% “partially true”, 27% “very much true”, and 13% “extremely true”.
Psychological distress
A skewed distribution was found for the GHQ-28 total scores, with a mean of 5.6 (SD = 6.4; Range = 0– 27) and a median of 3. A score above threshold (≥6), which indicates some psychiatric disorder, was found in 40.2% of the respondents. The highest scores were found for the subscale anxiety and insomnia (mean = 2.04; SD = 2.2), followed by the subscales somatisation (mean = 1.44; SD = 1.9), social dysfunction (mean = 1.35; SD = 1.9), and depression (mean = 0.77; SD = 1.7). There were no gender differences in regard to the GHQ-28 (t (100) = – 0.098, p = 0.922).
Reactive embitterment
A mean of 1.24 (SD = 0.92; Range = 0– 3.58) was found for the PTED-scale, with no gender differences (t (100) = 0.093, p = 0.926) and 25.5% showed a mean score higher than 2, indicating a clinically significant intensity of reactive embitterment [33]. To get a better understanding of what global embitterment scores mean, it can help to look at single items: 53.9% reported feelings of embitterment (“partially true”, “very much true”, and “extremely true”), 69.6% had to think about their unemployment over and over again, and 53.9% said that their unemployment led to a noticeable and persistent negative change in their mental well-being. Of even greater importance was that 11% said, that it was “very much true” or “extremely true”, that unemployment caused them to “draw back from friends and social activities” and made them “unable to pursue occupational and/or family activities as before”, and that 8% said that they “harbour thoughts of revenge”. The distribution of answers for all items of the PTED Scale is given in (Fig. 1).
Frequency Distribution for each Item of the PTED Scale (N = 102).
Relationship between embitterment, psychological distress and appraisal of unemployment (Table 1) shows the correlations between the PTED Scale, the GHQ-28, the unemployment appraisal, age, duration of unemployment, and feelings of injustice. Significant correlations were found between the PTED Scale, the GHQ-28, the unemployment appraisal, age, duration of unemployment, and feelings of injustice. General psychological distress, as measured with the GHQ-28 was not significantly related to any of the criteria of severity of unemployment.
Intercorrelations of the PTED Scale (N = 102)
Note: *(p < 0.05); **(p≤0.001).
Work problems or unemployment experiences can be associated with mental health problems [34]. In the present study, unemployment was not a problem for 22.6% of the participants, but it was a severe or very severe burden for 43.2%. The reasons for such divergent views of the same negative life events varied. Deep feelings of injustice, were felt by 40% of the participants, a significant degree of embitterment was found in 25.5% of the sample, as compared to about 2 to 3% in the general population [19]. As there may have been persons with “normal” and foreseeable unemployment like new graduates, the rate of embitterment in relevant cases may even be higher. Appraisal of unemployment and feelings of injustice were interrelated and both significantly associated with embitterment. This result was in line with Miller and Hoppe’s [11] finding that negative psychological reactions towards unemployment are primarily seen in connection with feelings of being treated unfairly in association with embitterment.
The interrelation between the duration of unemployment and age and the correlation with embitterment raises the question to what degree the perspective of unemployment leads to embitterment or whether embitterment leads to a prolongation of unemployment [35, 36]. The experience of discrimination in the labor market may increase with age and subsequently prolong feelings of embitterment. Prolonged unemployment can result in feelings of injustice and by this of embitterment. This can be associated with the desire to show the world how badly they have been treated. Thus, they may reject new job possibilities as this might imply that they should “forget” what had happened, a phenomenon frequently seen in persons with Post Traumatic Embitterment Disorder (PTED), a disabling mental disorder in reaction to severe and single experiences of injustice and humiliation, but can also occur in other forms of embitterment reactions [19, 37]. This can cause a further prolongation of unemployment.
Of interest is that general psychological distress does not show similar significant correlations with the indicators of severity of unemployment like duration, injustice, or appraisal. This suggests a separate role of embitterment, independent of psychological distress in general. This indicates that it may be important to discriminate between embitterment and general psychological distress. Distress is the consequence of burdens. The individual concerned will accept help and try to cope with the situation or in the worst case despair and give up. Embitterment is the consequence of perceived injustice, humiliation, and breach of trust, a burning emotion, which urges to fight back, to take revenge, to show the world what has happened, which may include dysfunctional behavior up to the point of rejecting help. Many law suits are driven by this emotion. Embitterment should therefore get adequate attention when dealing with unemployment issues.
Limitations include the cross-sectional design and the use of correlational techniques which do not address cause and effect. We were only able to use a relatively small convenience sample of unemployed and relied exclusively on measures of self-report. Only limited information on the job history and social situation of the participants was included.
Conclusion
Embitterment was found to be relevant to a number of unemployed persons in this sample. Further research into the impact of feelings of embitterment and the management of unemployment are needed [38]. It can be assumed that unemployment in relation to burn out and other mental health problems may also in some cases be associated with embitterment [39, 40]. Efforts to reduce feelings of embitterment at the time of job termination should be explored.
Conflict of interest
None to report.