Friends Find It Harder To Forgive: Study

Main Category: Psychology / Psychiatry
Article Date: 12 Nov 2009 - 18:00 PDT

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You may hurt the ones you love but 'forgive and forget' is much more likely to apply in intimate relationships than it is to your friends, according to research results from The Australian National University, being released as part of National Psychology Week.

The study by Clinical Psychology PhD Candidate Jodie Burchell, suggests that although the people that are closest to you have the greatest capacity to hurt your feelings, over time people feel less hurt from events occurring in an intimate relationship than they do from those involving close friends.

Her work aims to build on studies that have suggested evolutionary selection favoured those emotions that increased our ancestors' chances of surviving and subsequently reproducing. Recent research has suggested that hurt feelings have evolved to signal that a person's inclusion in a group or relationship is in danger. Ms Burchell's study is investigating whether the closeness of the relationship with the perpetrator of the hurtful event predicts how hurt a person reports feeling.

"The study found that no matter the event - whether it caused low or high hurt - people felt most hurt by those they were in close relationships with," said Ms Burchell.

"However, over time, people felt less hurt from events occurring in a highly intimate relationship, such as with a romantic partner, than they did in a moderately close relationship, such as with a close friend. That suggests that highly intimate relationships can both facilitate the greatest feelings of hurt, and best encourage their healing."

The study is the first that simultaneously asks people how hurt they have felt when wronged by a romantic partner, a close friend and an acquaintance. The results are drawn from two questionnaires that participants took part in. in the first, participants read stories representing either low or high hurt situations across a range of relationships. In the second, participants recalled the most hurtful thing that their current romantic partner, close friend or acquaintance had done to them.

"The results taken together suggest that people that are closer to the victim of the hurtful event are more able to inflict hurt upon them, regardless of the type of hurtful act they commit," said Ms Burchell. "However, people may be more willing to forgive their current romantic partners for hurtful acts, if they choose to stay with them. This is in contrast to close friends, where many people reported being unable to regain trust and quality of relationship after very hurtful acts.

"It may be that the highest levels of intimacy with a person, a romantic relationship, are able to both create the most vulnerability to hurt as well as best facilitating a person letting go of hurt feelings," she said.

Source
The Australian National University

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