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21 - Cultural Influences on the Causes and Experience of Hurt Feelings

from PART V - HURT IN APPLIED CONTEXTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2010

By
Robin M. Kowalski
Edited by
Anita L. Vangelisti
Anita L. Vangelisti
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
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Summary

The purpose of this chapter is to examine cultural influences on the antecedents, phenomenology, and expression of hurt feelings. Most research on hurt feelings has been conducted in Western cultures, with relatively little attention paid to the ways in which the experience and expression of hurt feelings might vary cross-culturally. Furthermore, research on hurt feelings, relative to other emotions, is in its infancy. A key issue is the degree to which hurt feelings represent a distinct emotional state as opposed to the degree to which hurt feelings are simply a blend of other emotions. Although people who experience hurt feelings may also be sad, angry, or fearful – all emotions that have received fairly extensive attention from cross-cultural researchers – we cannot simply assume that findings from research on sadness, anger, and fear directly apply to hurt feelings (Vangelisti, Young, Carpenter-Theune, & Alexander, 2005). In addition, other emotions that often accompany hurt feelings are caused by other, different appraisals in the situation. If a rejection event that produces hurt feelings seems unjustified, a person might feel angry; if the rejection event involves a loss, he or she might feel sad. But these are separate from the appraisals that cause hurt per se (see Leary & Leder, Chapter 2, this volume). To the degree that cross-cultural research has been useful in helping us delineate emotions other than hurt feelings, particularly given differences in appraisals of some situations across, for example, individualistic and collectivist cultures, examining cultural influences on hurt feelings should aid us in advancing our knowledge of this underresearched emotion.

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Feeling Hurt in Close Relationships , pp. 457 - 478
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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