As a highly social species, human survival and development are largely based on communication, cooperation and interpersonal relationships. Language, as a tool for understanding interpersonal behavior, plays an important role in these relationships. However, language can also hurt people, and negative words can convey aggression and negativity, but we still know very little about how people are affected by verbal insults.
A new paper recently published in Frontiers in Communication shows that regardless of the context in which the abuse occurs, people who hear offensive words get a “little slap in the face”.
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Since insults pose a threat to our reputation and our “self,” it also provides an important opportunity to study the interplay between language and emotion. Understanding what and how an insulting expression affects people has important implications for psycholinguists, as well as those wishing to understand the details of social behavior.
The researchers designed experiments to explore differences in people’s sensitivity to insults and compliments. The common assumption is that insulting speech provokes a series of processing outcomes in rapid succession or overlapping, and that different parts of these outcomes may be affected differently by repetition, some disappearing quickly and others over an extended period of time Stay strong inside.
The researchers used electroencephalography (EEG) and skin conductance to record and compare the short-term effects of repeated verbal insults, positive comments, and neutral comments.
They first tested 79 female participants with EEG and skin conductive response electrodes, and then, they read a series of repeated statements. These statements implement three different speech acts: insults (“Samsung is terrible”), praise (“Samsung is impressive”), and neutral, factually correct descriptions (“Samsung is Dutch”).
To test whether the effects of these words depended on the recipient of the statement, half of the three sets of statements used the participant’s own name and the other half used someone else’s name. The experiment involved no real interaction between the participant and another person, and the participants were told that the statements came from three different men.
The researchers found that even under unnatural conditions—a laboratory setting without real human interaction, where statements came from fictional characters—verbal insults still had an effect, even after repetition, regardless of who was addressed.
Verbal Insults Still Have An Impact Even After Repetition | Pixabay
Specifically, P2 is a waveform composition of event-related potential (ERP, event-related potential) measured on the human scalp. The EEG showed that the P2 amplitude of the early insult effect was stably reproduced and did not depend on the target of the insult. In a psycholinguistic laboratory experiment, insults produced lexical “micro-slaps” if there was no real interaction between the speakers, so that participants’ attention was reduced when reading strongly negative evaluative words. Automatically attracted, regardless of the frequency of vocabulary retrieval.
However, this study only shows the impact of verbal insults in artificial settings. Participants will recognize the offense, but as an out-of-context statement, the actual emotional effect of the insult loses its power. However, due to ethical constraints, it is obviously impossible to study the efficacy of verbal insults in a real environment.
Even so, the findings are still strong enough to show that our brains are more sensitive to negative words than positive words. Insults grab our brain’s attention immediately because the emotional meaning of the insult is retrieved from long-term memory. In contrast, praise elicited only a weaker P2 effect, suggesting that we are more likely to notice negative emotions than positive emotions in interpersonal relationships.
references
[1] https://ift.tt/xpdkFG5
[2] https://ift.tt/y2DNiLl
Compilation: Oasis
Editor: Jin Xiaoming
Typesetting: Yin Ningliu
Title image source: Pixabay
research team
First author/corresponding author Marijn E. Struiksma
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Paper information
Published the journal Frontiers in Communication
Posted July 18, 2022
Thesis titleDo People Get Used to Insulting Language?
(DOI:
https://ift.tt/dhU13ky)
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