In the first study, participants gave retrospective accounts of an experience of being hurt by a romantic partner. These accounts supported the above proposition, and although different types of hurtful events differed in important ways, a sense of pain and injury emerged as the dominant theme in accounts of emotional reactions. The emotion terms generated in Study 1 were used as stimuli in a word-sorting task in Study 2, which confirmed that many of the terms were perceived specifically as injury-related. The findings suggest that hurt is elicited by "...relationship transgressions that damage the victim's core beliefs about self or others…[and] the sense of personal injury that lies at the heart of hurt feelings is often accompanied by other negative emotions, which depend on the type of hurtful event."
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