Proven: words can really hurt
Sometimes a sneer from someone can hit you hard. At such a moment, you are overwhelmed by a sharp pain and you can feel in your body that you are completely taken aback by this mean remark. I am someone who remembers everything, so almost every insult I have ever received is burned into my retina. That one teacher who claimed I wasn't a ‘real’ vwo student, my first boyfriend who jokingly said that I actually have a terrible voice, my old boss who thought I wasn't social enough, and I could go on like this for a while.
Well, mean remarks can really hurt someone and what's more: according to science, such an insult is even experienced just like getting a slap in the face. A study was published in Frontiers in Communication where researchers measured the brain activity of 79 women to see how they reacted to insults.
The participants were shown three different types of remarks: insulting, complimentary, and/or neutral. Some received only one insult while others were insulted repeatedly. To investigate whether the impact of the words depended on who was insulted, in half of the cases the participant's own name was used and in the other half the name of someone else. There was no real interaction between the participants and other people; the women were simply told that the remarks were made by three different men.
The results? The insulting remarks actually caused pain in the participants, even though they knew they were part of an experiment. It also didn't matter who the nasty remark was about and how often it happened; the brain activity showed the same effect for every insult: a brain wave that peaked 200 milliseconds after the stimulus. From this, the researchers concluded that the brain reacts the same way to such an insult as it does to receiving a ‘small’ slap in the face. At the moment you hear the remark, it literally feels like receiving a hit.
Finally, the research showed that our brains react much less strongly to compliments. An insult immediately grabs the attention of our brain, unlike something nice, in other words: our brains pay more attention to negative remarks than to positive words. Well, then we understand why those nasty statements stick much more. Therefore, let's try to think a little longer when we plan to insult someone from now on.
