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Disparage: Meant to belittle the value or importance of someone or something.-  http://www.merriam-webster.com

A great deal of human emotion arises in response to real, anticipated, remembered, or imagined rejection by other people. Because acceptance by other people improved evolutionary fitness, human beings developed biopsychological mechanisms to apprise them of threats to acceptance and belonging, along with emotional systems to deal with threats to acceptance. This article examines seven emotions that often arise when people perceive that their relational value to other people is low or in potential jeopardy, including hurt feelings, jealousy, loneliness, shame, guilt, social anxiety, and embarrassment. Other emotions, such as sadness and anger, may occur during rejection episodes, but are reactions to features of the situation other than low relational value. The article discusses the evolutionary functions of rejection-related emotions, neuroscience evidence regarding the brain regions that mediate reactions to rejection, and behavioral research from social, developmental, and clinical psychology regarding psychological and behavioral concomitants of interpersonal rejection.

Interpersonal rejections constitute some of the most distressing and consequential events in people's lives. Whether one considers a romantic rejection, the dissolution of a friendship, ostracism by a group, estrangement from family members, or merely being ignored or excluded in casual encounters, rejections have myriad emotional, psychological, and interpersonal consequences. People not only react strongly when they perceive that others have rejected them, but a great deal of human behavior is influenced by the desire to avoid rejection.

The emotion that is most consistently and incontrovertibly associated with low perceived relational value is the one that people colloquially call “hurt feelings.” In many ways, hurt feelings can be regarded as the “rejection emotion^" in that people's feelings are hurt by events that connote that other people do not regard their relationship with them to be as valuable or important as the individual desires, thereby leading them to feel rejected.

In a study of 168 hurtful episodes, all but two of the episodes appeared to be caused by participants' perceptions that one or more other people did not sufficiently value their relationship. Furthermore, participants' ratings of how hurt they felt in the situation they recounted correlated highly with the degree to which they felt rejected. Criticism was the most common cause of hurt feelings. Not only does criticism convey that another person thinks that one possesses negatively valued attributes, often with implications for one's relational value and acceptance, but the simple action of voicing a criticism, even one that is justified, sometimes implies that the criticizer does not value his or her relationship with the target. (People often refrain from strongly criticizing those they care about.) In addition, people in this study also reported being hurt by betrayal (which indicates that the betrayer does not adequately value his or her relationship with the betrayed person), passive disassociation (ignoring or avoiding the individual), and, of course, explicit rejection, exclusion, ostracism, and abandonment.

In brief, evidence shows that people's feelings are hurt when they believe that others do not sufficiently value their relationship. People also sometimes become angry when they feel rejected but, as with sadness, anger is not caused by perceived low relational value per se. Rather, anger arises during rejection episodes when people interpret the rejection as unjustified harm. In some cases, people who feel rejected not only become angry, but also react aggressively. Indeed, anger may be designed to prevent, terminate, or punish specific behaviors that are perceived as an immediate threat^. Jilted lovers sometimes lash out, domestic violence commonly erupts when people feel devalued by family members, and school shootings are usually perpetrated by students who feel ostracized by their peers. Whether people aggress when rejected depends on a number of factors; for example, aggression is more likely when people value the relationship, believe that the rejection was unfair, and believe that the relationship cannot be repaired. People typically experience hurtful events as rejection, although people's feelings can be hurt even when they know that other individuals accept or care about them at some level if they believe that the others do not value their relationship as much as they desire.

People experience intense happiness, if not joy, when they feel admired, appreciated, or deeply loved, and explicit evidence that one has high relational value—such as being accepted into desired groups, forming friendships, and developing other kinds of social bonds—evokes pleasurable feelings as well.

The fact that a large portion of human emotion is devoted to the maintenance of interpersonal connections points to the importance of acceptance and belonging in human affairs. People are inherently motivated to be valued and accepted by other people, and many of the emotions that they experience reflect these fundamental interpersonal concerns.

Mark R. Leary PhD,  Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4734881/

Courtesy of the U.S. National Library of Medicine