Mattering is unique in terms of psychological constructs because it is, in essence, a part of the self that is based on reflected appraisals of the self (i.e., our perceptions of how much other people regard us). Also, it is rooted in interpersonal relation-ships, so it is very much as social-cognitive construct.
Rosenberg and McCullough (1981) were the originators of the mattering con-struct. They emphasized relational mattering in terms of feeling significant to other people. They saw the experience of feelings of mattering as a reflected appraisal with three components: (1) feeling that other people depend on us; (2) perceiving that other people regard us as important; and (3) knowing and feeling that other people are actively paying attention to us. They suggested that the most central ele-ment is the facet of mattering that involves positive feelings of being a focus of attention. Rosenberg (1985) further proposed that mattering also includes feeling that other people would miss us if we were no longer around. Schlossberg (1989) added that mattering entails feeling appreciated by other people. This appreciation can be in terms of what someone does for someone, but also entails appreciating the person as a whole. Flett (2018b) added that mattering involves uniquely being noticed as an individual as is the case when someone sees something positive in you that others seemed to have missed. This aspect is most evident when someone is made to feel uniquely special and prized.
When it comes to core elements of this construct, there are other ways of framing mattering that merit consideration. For instance, it has been noted that a key theme when it comes to mattering is the feeling of being cared for and cared about (see Flett & Zangeneh, 2020). There are few better feelings than the feeling experienced at the moment when you realize that someone truly cares about you as a person. This feeling is typically accompanied by the sense of being positively regarded and accepted without any conditions whatsoever. This feeling typically results when someone sees something in you that other people don’t see and they clearly believe in you and your potential.
Key extensions of the mattering construct have emerged in recent years. Prilleltensky (2020) emphasized that mattering must include not only having value to others, but also giving value to others (also see Prilleltensky & Prilleltensky, 2021). This notion of giving value to others reflects the therapeutic value of boost-ing a sense of self by doing meaningful things for other people. Mattering derived from rewarding efforts to give value to others and make a difference in their lives can build a sense of agency and efficacy along with a sense of mastery and self- determination that further adds to positive feelings. The mattering construct has been expanded further and made more clinically relevant through a focus on feelings of not mattering and their destructiveness. Flett (2018b) introduced the feeling of anti-mattering, which arises when people are mar-ginalized and made to feel unimportant and insignificant to others. Anti-mattering is qualitatively distinct from the positive feelings of mattering and research has estab-lished that anti-mattering and mattering are not simply endpoints of the same continuous dimension (see Flett et al., 2022). People who unseen, unheard, and unvalued are likely high in feelings of not mattering to others.
Flett and associates (2022) showed with the development of the Anti-Mattering Scale that there are clear individual differences in levels of anti-mattering and ele-vated levels are linked with distress and low well-being. Chronic and intense feel-ings of not mattering are presumed to evoke psychological pain (see Flett, 2018a, b). This theme is revisited in a subsequent segment of this chapter.
Flett (2018b) also proposed that there are related individual differences in the fear of not mattering to others. The person who has fear of not mattering likely suf-fers from insecurity and if they have achieved a sense of mattering, they may be preoccupied with losing a sense of mattering or needing reassurance of still matter-ing to others (for discussions, see Casale & Flett, 2020, 2023). Research in various contexts has shown that the fear of not mattering can be reliably measured and it I am a unique predictor of distress and related outcomes when pitted against other mattering measures (see Besser et al., 2022; Chen et al., 2022; McComb et al., 2020).
Mattering as it is usually conceptualized is typically assessed with the five-item General Mattering Scale with its positively worded scale items (see Marcus & Rosenberg, 1987), and there is now growing use of the five-item Anti-Mattering Scale (Flett et al., 2022) and the negatively worded items that tap feelings of being invisible and insignificant. But one reason why mattering has tremendous scope and applicability is that it is also possible to assess meaningful individual differences in specific domains. That is, mattering can be assessed in terms of mattering the fam-ily; indeed, in their original work, Rosenberg and McCullough (1981) utilized rudi-mentary measures assessing the extent to which adolescents felt like they mattered to their parents. Mattering can also be assessed in terms of perceived significance to significant others such as romantic partners. Mattering has also been measured with specific domain-specific measures that assess mattering at school, mattering at work, and mattering in the community (see Flett, 2018a, b). One basic untested pos-sibility is that the level of protection from depression and suicide will escalate as a function of the extent to which mattering is felt across multiple domains (i.e., mat-tering at home, at work, and in the community) and multiple people in one’s live.
The current chapter focuses on relational mattering, but it should be noted that it is also possible to assess individual differences in terms of mattering in society. Fromm (1941) is typically credited with introducing the notion of mattering in soci-ety. Clearly, there should be greater risk for the person who feels insignificant in terms of personal relationships but who is also someone who feels small and insig-nificant in the world. Some key research investigations of mattering and suicide are reviewed and sum-marized below. First, however, it is important to be clear about what mattering is not so that it is clearly distinguished from other relevant constructs (for a related discus-sion, see Flett, 2018b). Mattering is often equated with a sense of belongingness (e.g., Van Orden et al., 2010), but has elements that distinguish it. Belonging is about fitting in and feeling welcome while mattering is about a person’s perceived significance and involves reflected appraisals of worth. Regarding their ability to be distinguished, it is possible for instance to feel part of a group (i.e., high belonging) but also feel unheard and invisible within the group (i.e., low mattering). I have found in research conducted with my school board colleagues that it is possible and meaningful at the person to identify adolescents who feel like they belong at school but they lack a sense of mattering at school.
Mattering is also clearly distinguishable from self-esteem, both in terms of con-ceptualization and empirical work. Rosenberg and McCullough (1981) discussed this point at length in their original article and demonstrated how measures of mat-tering to parents predict distress and other tendencies after taking into account indi-vidual differences in self-esteem (also see Rosenberg, 1985).
Finally, while mattering has been lumped together with feeling like a burden by some researchers (e.g., Drabenstott, 2019), feelings of not mattering to others and feelings of being a burden to others are quite different in their emphases and associ-ated experiences, as well as their implications for prevention and treatment.
Overview and Summary of Existing Research
When considering the potential role of feelings of not mattering in suicide, it is of course recognized that there is need for a complex approach and there are multiple contributing factors that could be playing a role when someone has become suicidal (for related discussions, see Joiner, 2007; O’Connor & Nock, 2014). The heteroge-neity among people who die by suicide must be recognized. However, mattering is clearly a highly pertinent factor, and for some people, it takes on the utmost importance. How does mattering fit into the broader picture? Shneidman (1984) proposed that there are various sets of factors of developmental importance that represent potential pathways to become suicidal. One set of factors was deemed to reflect trauma. It involved being raised in a rejecting family characterized by providing little to no emotional support. It can be the case in extreme contexts that the child is exposed to various forms of abuse, including emotional abuse and emotional neglect. The overall family environment may be emotionally invalidating for the child, and this can result in feeling minimized and unvalued. Parenthetically, emo-tional abuse and neglect have been linked with lower levels of mattering (see Flett et al., 2016), but the specific role of an invalidating environment has not been assse-sed. It should be clear, however, that the conclusion that children in these types of situations would likely reach is that they simply are unimportant or they are very low on the list of who and what matters to their family members. Rosenberg and McCullough (1981) suggested that this type of feeling is especially likely if raised by self-focused and highly narcissistic parents. The original work by Rosenberg and McCullough (1981) showed in four large samples of adolescents that feelings of not mattering to one’s parents were linked with depression and the feeling of not mat-tering to parents (or the feeling of not mattering enough to parents) was correlated with low self-esteem but nevertheless still predicted unique distress beyond self- esteem. This evidence solidified Rosenberg’s (1985) contention that the feeling of mattering or not mattering represents a unique element of the self-concept. To understand how much impact this could have, I invite individual readers to reflect on how it would feel if you reached the point of feeling insignificant and unimport-ant to the very people who are especially significant to you. Now imagine that you projected that same feeling into the future and you determined that you would never matter to these people. This thought might be played over and over in your mind to the point that escaping from these types of thoughts and feelings seems imperative.
As noted in Flett (2018b), there are two relevant ways for mattering to matter in vulnerability to suicide. One route is to have a low level of mattering as reflected by continuous measures. This is the focus of the research summarized below. Another way is to have a sense of mattering but then lose this feeling or sense of mattering. Individual difference in the loss of mattering has been shown to be relevant in the experience of depression (see Pearlin & LeBlanc, 2001) but moving from a position of perceived mattering to no longer mattering has yet to be studied in terms of its role in suicide. This element may be especially salient among older adults who become suicidal.
What research evidence supports the proposed role of feelings of not mattering in suicide? All relevant studies conducted thus far have yielded evidence in keeping with the themes found in this chapter. At present, about 15 studies have been reported. A complete summary is beyond the scope of this chapter, so six represen-tative examples are outlined below.
The most widely cited study is also one of the first investigations to appear in the literature. Elliott et al. (2005) examined the data from over 2000 adolescents between the ages of 11 and 18 years old who took part in the Youth at Risk Survey. Mattering was assessed with 36-items adapted from the Mattering Index (Elliott et al., 2004) so that they measured mattering to friends and mattering to parents. Suicide ideation was measured by just two questions (i.e., “During the past 12 months, did you ever seriously consider attempting suicide?” and “During the past 12 months, did you ever seriously consider attempting some action you hoped would cause your death by someone else?”). Participants were considered to have suicide ideation if they answered yes to either question. Finally, adolescents also completed a version of the Rosenberg (1965) Self-Esteem Scale. Additional details are available in Elliott (2009).
Elliott et al. (2005) reported a strong effect of mattering on suicide association such that levels of suicide ideation levels rose as mattering scores fell below the mean. Because the impact of mattering seemed to disappear when self-esteem was added in to the equation, Elliott and associates (2005) proposed that self-esteem acts as a mediator of the link between mattering and levels of depression and suicide ideation.
Joiner et al. (2009) conducted the next comprehensive study with sample of 815 emerging adults with a mean age of about 20 years old who were born around 1980. Participants were prescreened and reported experiencing anhedonia or sadness, or both. Participants were from a longitudinal study in Miami Dade country. These participants were then followed up and they completed the General Mattering Scale (Marcus & Rosenberg, 1987), as well as a measure of family support and composite suicide index comprised of thoughts about death (i.e., death ideation), suicide, and suicide plans. It was found that about 37.5% of the sample reported at least some suicide ideation. Analyses indicated the presence of a small but significant associa-tion between lower levels of mattering and suicide ideation. It was also found that mattering was associated with elevated levels of family support and that mattering and family support interacted to predict suicide ideation; that is, higher suicide ide-ation was reported by participants characterized jointly by low levels of mattering and family support. These results illustrate the need to regard low mattering as a risk factor that can combine interactively with other predictors of suicide ideation.
Milner et al. (2016) assessed mattering and suicide ideation in a sample of 932 Australian adults. Mattering was measured with the five item General Mattering Scale (Marcus & Rosenberg, 1987). Phone interviews deemed that most people (i.e., 809 participants) had no thoughts of suicide, but 123 participants did report thoughts of suicide. Analyses confirmed that the proposed negative association between mattering to others and suicide was evident. Moreover, this association was still apparent when other key predictors were taken into consideration including levels of psychological distress and key demographic factors. Milner et al. (2016) concluded based on their analyses that there was a linear negative association between mattering and suicide ideation.
Holden et al. (2018) examined mattering and various suicide indices in a sample of 244 adults from the United States. They took a very different approach by having participants complete a five-item measure developed by the authors that combined feelings of mattering and feelings of being loved along with measures tapping the need to belong, suicide motivation, suicide preparation, and suicide behaviors. Correlational analyses that the combined measure of feelings of mattering and love was linked negatively with suicide motivation (r = −.47), suicide preparation (r = −.25), and suicide behaviors (r = −.35). The need to belong had no significant associations with any of these measures.
It is my contention that the link between mattering and suicidality has often been underestimated because mattering has been narrowly measured in most studies. That is, some key facets of the construct have not been assessed. One key limitation is failing to go beyond positive measures of mattering to others and there is no attempt to include measures that tap the negative orientation captured by the con-cept of anti-mattering and not feeling valued by others. The relevance of anti- mattering has been illustrated in two recent studies of suicidal tendencies. Etherson et al. (2022) examined perfectionism, mattering, depression, and sui-cide ideation. A sample of 181 undergraduate students complete a multidimensional measure of trait perfectionism, the General Mattering Scale, the Anti-Mattering Scale, and measures of depression and suicide ideation. This study is particularly unique in that it was longitudinal; participants completed the measures at Time 1 and again at 3 weeks later and 6 weeks later. Analyses of the data revealed that anti- mattering mediated the link between socially prescribed perfectionism (i.e., others demanding perfect from the self) and distress. Most notably, it was found at each timepoint that anti-mattering was significantly correlated linked with suicide ide-ation. Importantly, analyses across timepoints indicate that anti-mattering at Time 1 is correlated significantly with suicide ideation at Time 3. Scores on the General Mattering Scale at Time 1 also predicted Time 3 suicide ideation, though the obtained association was considerably weaker than the link that was evident between anti-mattering and suicide ideation.
The final study strongly attests to the salience and validity of anti-mattering among people who are suicidal. This research by Deas et al. (2023) had it in title the phrase “I just want to matter” and this was clearly supported by the evidence they reported. Deas, Kowalski, and their colleagues described an innovative study that utilized a unique approach by examining the online posts of people who shared their thoughts, feeling, and concerns as part of an online suicide community. It was found from analyzing over half a millions online posts that anti-mattering themes were quite abundant. Overall, anti-mattering was in 70% of the posts! Other results exam-ined the themes that anti-mattering co-occurred with, and it was found that the pres-ence of significant associations suggested anti-mattering themes were linked with such themes as psychache and loneliness.
The research conducted thus far has yielded results entirely in keeping with the role of feelings of not mattering in suicidality but as noted above, this research is clearly limited in some key respects. Most studies have been cross-sectional rather than longitudinal, with one exception being the Etherson et al. (2022) investigation. However, there are other limitations. For instance, despite evidence that feelings of not mattering in specific domains such as the community are linked with suicidality (see Flett, 2018a, b), no study has considered within the same investigation whether people who lack a sense of mattering across multiple contexts (e.g., at school, at home, and in the community) are especially at risk.
Other key possibilities have yet to be tested whatsoever. All existing studies have focused on levels of mattering as assessed by measures such as the General Mattering Scale. The potential role of loss of mattering has not been considered. People who have experienced significant and potentially sudden life changes may be prone to suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts following a significant decline in perceived mattering (e.g., relationship loss, job loss through loss of employment or retire-ment). It is possible for these people that they have lost not only a sense of mattering but also a sense of meaning to the extent that they do not see a positive future.