We know it hurts to be insulted. It feels like a slap in the face when words are slung with spite.
Research shows that shocks to spoken insult linger longer than praise or compliment.
A group of researchers in the Netherlands recorded people's brain activity when they heard people say bad things about them.
It can be easy to ignore a compliment, but a snide remark can bother us for a long time. They don't lose their sting when they insult.
The team writes that they may gain more insight into the everyday experience of why some things continue to move us while others do not.
When we hear an insult, our brains are busy. It takes a split second to remember the meaning of words and to understand a speaker's intentions.
They wondered how our brains respond to offensive language compared to neutral facts.
The researchers found that our brain's rapid-fire reaction to insults doesn't diminish with repeated verbal insult.
Regardless of who the insult was directed at, the researchers found that short bursts of brain activity in the front part of the listener's brain.
The very rapid responses, which the researchers say are akin to a slap in the face, did not diminish over time; offensive statements continued to grab the brain's attention, generating large responses of similar magnitude, regardless of how often the invectives were heard.
The results of the experiments showed that compliment elicited a larger response in the brain than insult did.
"This suggests that whatever aspect of insults is responsible for capturing extra attention, whether it be the emotional meaning of words or the memory of past experiences, something which the study couldn't untangle," the team writes.
According to the researchers, the fact that insults seem to capture the brain's attention within 250 milliseconds is indicative of our sensitivity to undesirable social behavior and also that our reactions to insults are automatic.
The team found that our brains respond to compliment in a stable way.
The waves of brain activity that came from positive statements were smaller than the waves of brain activity that came from insults. It would indicate a lot of positive vibes.
Our brains tend to fixate on negative events more intensely than they do good things.
It's a lot for study participants to endure when they're subjected to a lot of insults and swear words. We don't need a study to know how insulted we are.
The study was only done in a lab setting, so it might not generalize to other situations.
Struiksma and colleagues note that this is a far cry from reality. They don't think men would respond in a different way to insults.
Even so, the results thus far show that even under these highly unnatural conditions, verbal insults still get at you and continue to do so over time, at least at some level.
It was published in a journal.
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