The Relationship Between Perceived Criticism and Trait Victimhood

Abstract

Those who perceive that people are more critical of them also tend to feel more victimized in their relationships. This relationship was measured with the Perceived Criticism scale which reliably predicts relapse and recurrence of symptoms in mental health disorders, and the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood (TIV) scale. TIV is a newly developed personality construct that measures an individual’s ongoing sense of victimhood that permeates many different types of interactions. The participants of the study were 242 individuals who were between 18 and 30 years old and they were recruited by the Clinical Research Lab from the Harvard university pool and online platform Reddit. Pearson’s correlation showed a significant relationship between perceived criticism and the tendency to feel victimhood. Additionally, the dimensions of the TIV (the need for recognition, moral elitism, lack of empathy, and rumination) were also correlated with the perceptions of criticism. Those who evaluated their close ones as highly critical had higher rates of rumination, felt lack of empathy, needed more recognition, and felt morally superior. The sample for this study consisted mostly of students; therefore, this relationship between perceived criticism and victimhood can be explored further with participants from clinical settings using different demographics to obtain more generalizable results and compare PC average scores across different cultures.