Hurt feelings in children's friendships: Associations with social cognition, behavior, and adjustment

Prior research has often taken a global rather than situational approach to the study of children's emotional reactions to their social interactions. Furthermore, studies that have examined children's proximal emotional responses to negative peer experiences have generally not explored the association between children's feelings and their goals, strategies, and interpretations. The current study was designed to assess the association between children's emotions and their cognitive and behavioral responses when faced with friendship expectation transgressions. Particular focus was placed on the emotion of hurt feelings, which has been rarely studied in the domain of children's peer relations. Fourth- and fifth-grade children (n = 270) completed a new hypothetical vignettes measure depicting friendship transgressions. In response to these vignettes, children rated their feelings of hurt, anger, and sadness, and their goals, strategies, and interpretations as well as their perceived severity of the transgressions. Children also indicated how much they would ruminate about the transgressions and how they would feel about themselves a week following the transgressions. Additionally, children completed measures of peer acceptance, loneliness, and self-worth, and peer nominations of behavior.;Results indicated that whereas hurt feelings and sadness were generally associated with prosocial goals and strategies, anger was associated with revenge goals and aggressive strategies. Anger emerged as a frequent mediator of the relation between children's interpretations of why the transgression occurred and their goals and strategies. Additionally, hurt feelings were predictive of a submissive behavior style and, in contrast, anger was associated with an aggressive behavior style. Although hurt feelings, anger, and sadness were all associated with increased reports of how much children would ruminate about the transgressions and with children's reports that the transgressions would make them feel badly, limited relations between emotion and any other indexes of social adjustment emerged. Results of this research demonstrate the differential relations between children's responses to friendship transgressions and their experiences of hurt feelings versus anger. These findings highlight the need for hurt feelings and anger to be explored separately in future research rather than combined to create a single "negative affect" index.