The purpose of this chapter is to show how hurt feelings are avoided not only by humans, but also by the scientific and professional literature. This avoidance is either straightforward – hurt feelings are not mentioned – or indirect – as when a host of circumlocutions are used to avoid dealing with these feelings directly. However, an important distinction should be made from the outset: There is a difference between avoidance and neglect. Avoidance means denying, repressing, and suppressing hurt feelings. Neglect means being aware of those feelings but ignoring them by denying their importance. Neglect is another expression of avoidance.

With the advent of recent important publications (Barrett, Mesquita, Ochsner, & Gross, 2007; Coen & Allen, 2007; Reisenzein & Doring, 2009), relying on this distinction between feelings on the receptive side and emotions on the expressive side and adding a critical semantic analysis (such as performed in this chapter) might seem like beating a dead horse. However, equating and lumping together feelings with emotions without distinguishing between these two separate processes (L’Abate, 2009b) is an equation that is still persistently strong in the extant emotion literature. It must be shown that such an equation is misleading conceptually, unnecessary empirically, and superfluous practically.