May 13, 2015 05:11 PM EDT By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

New research suggests that bragging to co-workers, even a humble brag," actually can be self-destructive.   

Researchers at the City University London, Carnegie Mellon and Bocconi universities found that self-promoters, who post a photo of their brand new car on Facebook or brag about a raise, underestimate how much their self-promotion "elicits negative emotions," Ani News reported.

"Most people probably realize that they experience emotions other than pure joy when they are on the receiving end of someone else's self-promotion. Yet, when we engage in self-promotion ourselves, we tend to overestimate others' positive reactions and underestimate their negative ones," Irene Scopelliti, lead author of the study, said in a statement.

For the study, researchers conducted two experiments to find evidence of why self-promoters overestimate positive reactions to their good news and underestimate negative reactions. A third study "examined the consequences of the miscalibration, revealing that recipients of excessive self-promotion view self-promoters as less likeable and as braggarts," phys.org reported.

"These results are particularly important in the Internet age, when opportunities for self-promotion have proliferated via social networking. The effects may be exacerbated by the additional distance between people sharing information and their recipient, which can both reduce the empathy of the self-promoter and decrease the sharing of pleasure by the recipient," Scopelliti added.

The findings are detailed in the journal Psychological Science.

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