An exploration of humility as a facilitator of mentalization during attachment system activation

Theory and recent empirical findings suggest that stress related to attachment relationships can have an adverse impact on the ability to mentalize. Individual differences exist in the levels of attachment stress that can be tolerated before impairments in mentalization occur. In this study, humility was explored as a possible moderating variable to the effect of attachment stress on mentalization. Two samples (N = 109 and N = 214) were recruited online using the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. Participants were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. The General Humility Scale (GHS; Hill, Laney, & Edwards, 2014) was the primary measured used to assess humility. In the experimental group, attachment stress was induced by asking participants to reflect on an overwhelming interpersonal experience and complete various questions related to the memory. In the control condition, participants were asked to remember their favorite TV show or book. Following the experimental manipulation, all participants completed the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, Revised Version (RMET; Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, & Plumb, 2001), which was used to operationalize mentalization. Humility moderation analyses were non-significant in both samples. Post hoc analyses revealed that the Accurate Assessment of Self subscale of the GHS moderated the effect of attachment stress on negatively valenced RMET items in Sample 1 and neutrally valenced RMET items in Sample 2. However, these relationships were not stable across samples, so no serious conclusions could be drawn from these results.