How Does It Feel When People Forget Your Name or Name You Incorrectly?

Abstract

The present study investigated, using a questionnaire, how people feel (i.e., irritated, offended, and sad) when their own name was misprocessed (i.e., forgotten, uttered after a hesitation, mispronounced, or replaced by another person’s name) during a conversation with friends and close colleagues. Participants reported relatively low negative feelings after such naming incidents. Nevertheless, they reported being more irritated and offended than sad for all the incidents. They felt comparable levels of irritation and offense, except for mispronunciations that caused more irritation. Although participants reported weak negative feelings, they reported reacting often to all incidents, either by reminding the interlocutor of their names or by correcting them. The contrast between weak ratings of negative feelings and high ratings of reminding and correction shows that using the correction as the only indicator of bother when the own name is misprocessed can be misleading. Finally, the intensity of irritation triggered by incidents with the own name was negatively related with the participants’ propensity to misprocess other peoples’ names, but was not related with scores at the Rosenberg self-esteem scale nor with the level of self-symbolic value of the own name.