Irrespective of the situation, receiving an insult seems like a “little slap on you face,” according to a brain scan study. Experts have discovered that reading or hearing nasty remarks about oneself or others causes emotional harm to the brain, even during a context-free neutral environment such as a lab.
Researchers evaluated the connection between language and emotion
The particular relationship between language and feeling was a topic of investigation for researchers in the Netherlands. They examined 79 women employing skin conductance recordings and electroencephalography (EEG) to explore ways the brain reacts to compliments, neutral facts, and insults.
According to experts, humans are exceptionally social beings who frequently rely on social connections to thrive and survive. Their findings demonstrate the power of words.
Study author Dr. Marijn Struiksma of Utrecht University said, “The exact way in which words can deliver their offensive, emotionally negative payload at the moment these words are being read or heard is not yet well-understood.”
Researchers claim that because insults “threaten” a person’s image and feeling of “self,” they offer a unique chance to examine the relationship between language and emotion.
How insults affect the brain
Psycholinguists curious about how language affects people and others who want to comprehend the specifics of social conduct must comprehend what an offensive phrase does to someone as it emerges and why.
Researchers hypothesize that auditory insults cause a chain of quickly following or overlapping cognitive responses and that various chain components may be differently influenced by recurrence. For example, some swiftly fade off while others stay intensely sensitive for a prolonged period.
The researchers read the study participants’ insults, compliments, and factually corrective statements. Around 505 of the statements mentioned the reader’s name, which meant the participant was reading an insult about themselves, and the other half mentioned another person’s name.
Interestingly, even in a controlled setting without human interactions, researchers established that insults could get at someone irrespective of who the insult is targeting. Surprisingly, even after the exercise kept recurring, the insults continued to “slap” individuals.
