An insult gets the pulse racing. But what if you keep being insulted: do you get used to it? No, says neuroscientist Marijn Struiksma from Utrecht University. In an experiment, she and her team compared physical reactions to negative statements with reactions to positive or neutral statements.
As they report in “Frontiers in Communication”, they tracked the brain activity and skin conductivity of around 80 test subjects while they repeatedly read insults, compliments or neutral sentences, for example “Paula is a whore”, “Paula is a darling”. or »Paula is a student«. The sentences supposedly came from different men, and the names mentioned sometimes referred to a stranger, sometimes to the test subject himself.
The subjects reacted clearly to the verbal attacks – even when they were directed at strangers. For all three statements, the researchers first observed a characteristic brain wave called “P200”. This electrical signal pattern is a sign of heightened alertness. In contrast to compliments or neutral statements, the signal also appeared again and again in the case of repeated insults, regardless of whether the person was insulted or someone else. “An indication of a very rapid and stable attentional response,” explain the authors. Attention is subject to a »negativity bias«: it is automatically directed more towards negative than towards positive signals.