The lexicon of feeling offended

The work investigates a neglected but widespread emotion: feeling offended. After overviewing previous research on offense, which considers feeling offended mostly as a damage to a person’s image, a survey study is presented aimed at deepening the definition of feeling offended and the description of its typical episodes. The definition emerging from the content analysis allows to code and group the more frequent words used in the corpus and to run a lexicometric analysis that describes the emotions connected to the feeling of offense, the individual traits of offender and victim, the causes of offense, and the types of judgment that most typically appear offensive. The applicability of the present work is related to the extraction of potential states of this emotion in other corpora where implicit or past intergroup conflicts are not completely solved, by also allowing a possible annotation of their seriousness in view of a potential process of reconciliation. 1