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22 - Hurt Feelings: The Last Taboo for Researchers and Clinicians?

from PART V - HURT IN APPLIED CONTEXTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2010

By
Luciano L'Abate
Edited by
Anita L. Vangelisti
Anita L. Vangelisti
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
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Summary

The purpose of this chapter is threefold: (a) to note that researchers and clinicians, like most of us human beings, have avoided dealing directly with hurt feelings in their research and practice, (b) to provide researchers and clinicians a way to identify and conceptualize hurt through a theoretical model, and (c) to offer researchers and clinicians ideas about how to help people deal with their hurt feelings in positive ways.

The relevance of hurt feelings to personality socialization and to close relationships has been validated repeatedly in relationship research by Feeney (2004b, 2005) and by Vangelisti (1994; Vangelisti & Young, 2000), among others. Although this work has demonstrated the importance of hurt feelings to relationships, especially intimate relationships, researchers in psychology have not attended to this evidence, creating a gap between psychological theories of feelings and emotions and research results in relationship science. A perusal of most psychological treatises on feelings and emotions failed to yield the term hurt. At best, the term distress was cited in passim, but it was never defined or introduced as being relevant to theories and models of feelings and emotions. This is not surprising given that most of these theories and models are based on intrapersonal self-report, paper-and-pencil tests, or contrived laboratory experiments rather than on direct observations of hurt feelings in intimate relationships (Niedenthal, Krauth-Gruber, & Ric, 2006).

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Feeling Hurt in Close Relationships , pp. 479 - 498
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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