Assessing Who Needs to Matter Most: Development, Psychometric Properties, and Correlates of Measures of the Need to Matter, the Importance of Mattering, and Mattering Hypersensitivity.

Research and theory on mattering have evolved considerably, and the focus has been on individual differences in levels of feelings of mattering and not mattering to others. This work sought to advance understanding by uniquely examining individual differences in the need to matter and who is most impacted and influenced by feelings of not mattering to others. We introduce measures that assess levels of the need to matter, the personal importance of mattering (i.e., the importance of being important), and mattering hypersensitivity (i.e., vulnerability to feeling hurt when made to feel insignificant). Psychometric analyses confirmed that these measures comprise one factor each, with high internal consistency and adequate convergent validity. Correlational analyses established links between elevated scores and levels of psychological distress and narcissistic personality traits. Most notably, the unmet need to matter predicted unique variance in psychological distress and narcissistic traits beyond the variance attributable to self-esteem, general mattering, anti-mattering and fear of not mattering. Overall, these results attest to the research utility of the proposed measures, and they illustrate the risk to mental health and personal vulnerability of people with an unmet need to matter who have a heightened sensitivity and importance associated with whether they matter to other people.