THE DISTINCTIVE CONSTITUTION OF FEELING HURT 1 The Distinctive Constitution of Feeling Hurt: A Review and a Lazarian Theory David J. K. Hardecker Leipzig University, Department of Early Child Development and Culture, Germany Email: [email protected] Tel: T +49 (0) 341 97 31 874 September 28, 2018 The author is supported by a financial scholarship from the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Germany. Abstract What is the nature of feeling hurt? I answer this question by systematically reviewing and integrating theories and empirical findings on feeling hurt using Lazarus’ theory of emotion. Following this approach, feeling hurt is constituted by a primary appraisal of an illegitimate devaluation and by a secondary appraisal of low controllability which together activate an action tendency to withdraw from an interaction. I derive several predictions, e.g., that an increase in appraisals of controllability should turn hurt into anger. I also point out hypotheses on the facial, vocal, bodily and behavioral expression of feeling hurt and it’s communicative function. Further, I draw important conceptual distinctions between a broad and a narrow concept of feeling hurt as well as between feeling hurt as an emotion, a hurtful event and a long-term emotional episode of hurt. Finally, I systematically compare feeling hurt with humiliation, shame, guilt, disappointment, sadness, and anger. Keywords: hurt feelings, self-conscious emotion, shame, humiliation, anger The Distinctive Constitution of Feeling Hurt: A Review and a Lazarian Theory 1. Introduction As several newspapers reported in August 2015, a man called Ebrahim H. B. had been engaged to be married but the family of the bride-to-be had unexpectedly canceled the wedding just a few weeks before the wedding feast. He left to join ISIS in Syria. At his return, he explained why he had done so. According to Mail Online (Hall, 2015), he had been angry THE DISTINCTIVE CONSTITUTION OF FEELING HURT 2 but the term he originally had used was „gekraenkt“(SZ, 2015) - a German word that translates better to hurt feelings – „the core emotional marker of social rejection“(DeWall & Bushman, 2011) . This translation problem motivates the question addressed in this paper: what is the distinctive constitution of feeling hurt? What makes it different from anger as well as from other emotions? Although several emotion researchers (e.g.,Barrett (2009); Moors (2017); Scherer (1994)) may challenge the value of this question, distinguishing emotions is indispensable even often for their own research (cf. Scherer (1997)), for other research fields (e.g. developmental psychology, social psychology) as well as for practical applications such as emotional competence training (e.g. Nelis et al. (2011)). As the latter often rely on emotion research, they usually fail to include feeling hurt. The general importance of this emotional phenomenon results from at least three sources: clinical, because feeling hurt is presumably related to personality disorders of narcissism and borderline (Staebler, Helbing, Rosenbach, & Renneberg, 2011), depression or posttraumatic embitterment (Linden, 2003), societal, because it can lead to severe crime, e.g. revenge (Frijda, 1994; McCullough et al., 1998), and anthropological, because feeling hurt is presumably a universal phenomenon. At least 24 languages know equivalent words, for example, ”Seergemaak” in Afrikansk, ”Mindua sentitzea” in Basque, ”Megbntottsg” in Hindi and ”verletzt” or ”gekraenkt” in German (Fontaine, Scherer, & Soriano, 2013). And even though educationists in the US think of feeling hurt as so important that they explicitly teach preschool children to verbally express when their feelings have been hurt, many emotion researchers seem to be reluctant to investigate this emotion. Thus, this paper is intended to stimulate both empirical research and debate. Recent empirical evidence points to the distinctiveness of feeling hurt on a holistic level. Feeney (2005) conducted a word sorting-task, in which participants were asked to sort emotion terms into five categories (sadness, anger, fear, shame , hurt/injury). She found that, although the hurt/injury category overlapped with all other categories, “in pain”, “damaged”, “torn apart”, and “shattered” emerged as specific terms for the hurt/injury category. (2) Leary, Springer, Negel, Ansell, and Evans (1998) asked participants to recall hurtful episodes and to report how they had felt using 18 emotion terms. They found that other emotion ratings such as anger or sadness could not totally explain the variance of hurt feelings and that 6 to 13 % of variance could best be explained by hurt feelings. (3) Leary and Leder (2009) could replicate those findings both in another retrospective study, but also in an experimental study, in which hurt feelings were elicited by being chosen last by a team captain. The authors conclude that the term ‚hurt feelings‘ seems thus to refer to a specific emotional experience or feeling. In this paper, I will deepen and stimulate the debate by presenting an integrative view on the distinctiveness of feeling hurt on the level of its components, mainly its appraisal and action tendency component. I speak of “feeling hurt” instead of “hurt feelings” because of it being grammatically more simple to use, but I think of those terms as synonymous. First, I will specify criteria for the distinctiveness of an emotion based on the theory of Frijda (1986) and Lazarus (1991). Second, I review empirical findings and integrate theoretical ideas on feeling hurt into what I call the Lazarian Theory of Feeling Hurt. I will argue that based on a new conceptual distinction that is derived from the linguistic usage of feeling hurt as well as by taking into account left–out data we arrive at a promising theory. I will go beyond former accounts by suggesting how those components interact with each other THE DISTINCTIVE CONSTITUTION OF FEELING HURT 3 and by formulating falsifiable predictions. Besides taking into account the empirical evidence, I will also argue that there is a consensus among authors who did conceptualize feeling hurt independently from each other. Importantly, I do take into account writings of psychotherapists as I assume them to have in-depth knowledge about hurt feelings. Third, I elaborate on the theory by pointing out how feeling hurt can be coherently distinguished from other emotions. I will argue that only such a comprehensive theory is able to distinguish feeling hurt properly from other emotions. Finally, I derive novel predictions from the theory. In order to present a focused and precise discussion, I will not discuss findings of ’social pain’ (Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2004; MacDonald & Leary, 2005) as MacDonald (2009) classifies feeling hurt as one kind of social pain (the most relevant brain area in social pain, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), seems not specifically related to rejection and feeling hurt, but to negative social emotions in general (Eisenberger, 2015)). Thus, the findings on social pain, although not optimal, are neglected here. 2. The Distinctiveness of Emotions What distinguishes one emotion from another? According to Frijda and Scherer (2009) there seems to be a consensus that emotions consist of several components: (1) The cognitive component contains appraisal processes that evaluate objects and events concerning their significance for the organism. This significance arises because of its relation to the organism’s needs or motives. (2) The overall result of the appraisal process is an action tendency or more general, a change in action readiness (Frijda, 1986; Frijda, Kuipers, & Schure, 1989) that prepares and directs action (Scherer, 1987, 2005). (3) Those changes come along with physiological changes in the autonomous nervous system which provide energetic support (system regulation). (4) All those three components are monitored and subjectively experienced (Frijda, 1986) as a feeling and expressed via the action component (5) which serves communicative functions. Nonetheless, there are some important differences concerning the question of the relevance of each component for the distinctiveness of an emotion. According to the basic emotion approach, no component seems to be particularly pertinent, and 11-13 different characteristic features are more or less required (Ekman & Cordaro, 2011). Unfortunately, it is rather unclear how those many characteristics relate to each other. I prefer an organizational approach that is more parsimonious because it stipulates some components as central (e.g., appraisal, change in action readiness) (Frijda, 2008; Lazarus, 2001) and specifies how the different components relate to each other. I mainly follow Lazarus (1991, 2001) according to whom an emotion is distinct only if it can be described by a unique composition of a primary appraisal, a secondary appraisal as well as a change in action readiness. The primary appraisal refers to how an event is relevant for the individual and whether it is congruent or incongruent with a certain need. The secondary appraisal concerns the coping potential/controllability of the situation. I further distinguish between perceptual dimensions of appraisal that consist of mere knowledge (Lazarus & Smith, 1988) or perceptual content which is itself not valenced (e.g., agency, intentionality) and motivational dimensions (needs, motives, values). 3. The constitution of feeling hurt In this section, I discuss the nature of feeling hurt along the outlined components of