Influence of Sexual Assault Labels on Perceptions of Target Psychological Pain and Hardship

Influence of Sexual Assault Labels on Perceptions of Target Psychological Pain and Hardship | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Research Article Influence of Sexual Assault Labels on Perceptions of Target Psychological Pain and Hardship Charlie Huntington, Gina Paganini, Paige Lloyd This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-7566603/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Posted Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract Women’s pain is routinely underestimated by lay observers and medical practitioners alike, as well as undertreated. Perceptions of pain and needs for support may be influenced by the hardship bias, in which experiences of hardship are erroneously thought to inoculate against, rather than increase vulnerability to, subsequent experiences of pain. Many women are the targets of sexual violence, but minimal research has explored how perceivers understand the pain and hardship of women who have experienced sexual assault. Furthermore, the labels commonly used for targets of sexual violence (i.e., “victim” and “survivor”) carry differing connotations that may impact perceptions of pain and hardship, but whether such differential perceptions exist for sexual assault, or for other crimes, is currently unknown. Exploring these distinctions could have important implications for our understanding of how women who have been sexually assaulted are perceived and treated. To that end, we tested for the influence of labels in sexual assault and two other crimes (i.e., mugging and identity theft) on perceptions of psychological pain, hardship, and support needed. Interaction effects of crime type and label were observed for perceived hardship, psychological pain, and sensitivity to psychological pain, indicating that the effects of labels (survivor, victim, person who experienced) on person perception vary by crime type. Taking a closer look at perceptions of sexual assault, victims were perceived to have experienced a higher degree of pain and hardship than several other label and crime combinations. Our findings stress the need for more research to better understand the connotations these labels carry and ensure that women who experience sexual assault receive the care they need. Figures Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Introduction Hardship Women’s pain is routinely underestimated by lay observers and medical practitioners alike (Pronina & Rule, 2014; Zhang et al., 2021), as well as undertreated by medical practitioners (Samulowitz et al., 2018). Women in pain are perceived as complaining and overly emotional (Samulowitz et al., 2018) and people are also more likely to perceive women’s pain as exaggerated than men’s (Paganini et al., 2023; Schafer et al., 2016). Although most research on disparities in pain perception by gender has focused on pain in general, or physical pain, in particular (Samulowitz et al., 2018), women are commonly believed to be overly dramatizing the negative emotions they experience (Lloyd et al., 2020), suggesting their psychological pain is likely also underestimated and undertreated. One common cause of psychological distress for women is sexual assault (Dworkin et al., 2023; Short et al., 2022), which impacts over a quarter of women (Basile et al., 2022) and is considered among the most severe crimes one can experience (Frieze et al., 1987; Waters et al., 2005). However, minimal research has explored perceptions of the psychological pain of women who are victims of crime, and in particular women who have experienced sexual assault. In the current work, we are interested in perceptions of women’s psychological pain following a sexual assault. One understudied but potentially relevant factor in perceptions of women’s pain in this context are the labels used to identify targets of sexual assault, such as victim and survivor, which carry distinct connotations (Boyle & Rogers, 2020; Schwark & Bohner, 2019). The current study seeks to better understand where and how biases in psychological pain perception and support needs may occur for the targets of sexual assault by comparing the effects of different labels (e.g., victim, survivor, person who has experienced a crime) and different crime types (e.g., sexual assault, identity theft, mugging) on perceptions of women’s pain and hardship. Hardship Bias in Pain Perceptions A growing evidence base of social psychological research indicates that perceiving someone to have experienced hardship leads perceivers to believe they are less sensitive to pain (Deska et al., 2020; Dore et al., 2017; Hoffman & Trawalter, 2016; Summers et al., 2023), which can carry negative downstream consequences for medical treatment (Bernardes et al., 2021). Research examining hardship bias in pain perceptions has primarily focused on differences in perceived hardship across target identities (e.g., race or SES), whereas there is presently a dearth of work examining how this hardship bias is applied in judgments of individuals who have experienced sexual assault. In the most relevant work to date, Cheek and colleagues (2023) found that low- relative to high-SES women, who are perceived to have overcome more hardship, are expected to experience less pain and need less social support in response to workplace sexual harassment. Taking the abundant research on gender bias in pain perceptions and the limited research on pain perceptions around sexual violence together, it seems likely that perceptions of hardship might play an important biasing role in perceptions of women’s psychological pain in this context. The current work further considers whether perceived hardship and perceived psychological pain in a sexual assault context are variable based on the labels used. Labels for Sexual Assault Labels can be defined as collectively held mental representations of people or groups; particularly when a label is used to indicate some kind of group membership, such as one’s nationality, gender, or race, it may lead to an individual being perceived as embodying essential characteristics of that category (Haslam & Rothschild, 2000; Moradi et al., 2012). Labels used to describe people who have been the targets of violence are no exception: they appear to confer specific, and somewhat distinct, expectations regarding that individual’s psychological and physical state, as well as influence other’s perceptions of the individual (Hockett & Saucier, 2015). The labels typically used to describe the targets of sexual assault, “victim” and “survivor”, are sometimes described as conferring opposing traits (Boyle & Rogers, 2020; Schwark & Bohner, 2019; Setia et al., 2020). The label of victim may lead perceivers to see the target as passive and having been oppressed and is more likely to garner sympathy and compassion (Lamb, 1999; Mardorossian, 2014; Van Dijk, 2009). The victim label may elicit more sympathy because it seems also to be associated with helplessness and therefore less blame (Dunn, 2005). Conversely, the label of survivor seems to connote empowerment and agency, power, and resilience (Boyle & Rogers, 2020; Schwark & Bohner, 2019). Survivors may be seen as experiencing more hardship, perhaps because the event was especially severe (O’Shea et al., 2024; Setia & An, 2022), and as therefore being inured to pain and requiring less support. Accordingly, we hypothesize that women labeled as “survivors” compared to “victims” of sexual assault will be perceived as having experienced more hardship, as being less sensitive to pain and in less pain, and as needing less social support. By contrast, the label “person who has experienced sexual assault” has not, to our knowledge, been studied in peer-reviewed research. Prior research incorporating “person-first” language has looked primarily at perceptions of people with stigmatized identities relating to crime perpetration or mental illness; this study is among the first to consider how person-first language influences perceptions of the targets of crime. Thus far, research links person-first language to moderate effect sizes on reduced stigmatization for specific categories such as substance abuse (Ashford et al., 2018; Baker et al., 2022) and for mental illness more generally (Granello & Gibbs, 2016; Granello & Gorby, 2021), as well as smaller effect sizes for people who have committed crimes (Denver et al., 2017; Jackl, 2023). At the same time, some studies suggest that person-first language does not influence stigmatizing attitudes toward people with disabilities (Feldman et al., 2002; Lynch & Groombridge, 1994). As person-first language remains a contested but growing phenomenon in healthcare settings (Gernsbacher, 2017), but prior research has not related it to the constructs in this study, we include the label in our design but refrain from making any hypotheses about how it will differ from the survivor and victim labels. Role of Crime Type Whether target labels matter for pain perceptions is an open question not just for sexual assault, but for targets of crime more generally. In other words, the impact of labels such as victim and survivor may differ according to the crime committed. Sexual assault is perceived as an especially harmful crime; for example, Adriaenessen and colleagues (2020) found that sexual assault was perceived as more severe and more harmful than any other physically damaging or property damaging crimes (e.g., physical assault, burglary, corporate fraud) apart from murder and terrorism. In a recent survey, 61% of respondents thought that rape and homicide were equally severe crimes (Felson & Silver, 2024). This has led some authors (e.g., Akdeniz, 2020) to suggest a combinatorial effect of the physical and sexual violation of sexual assault in terms of bodily harm. Comparing sexual assault to other crimes offers the opportunity to contribute more broadly to our understanding of the survivor and victim labels and may offer insights into why these labels are differentially perceived within the context of sexual assault. The Current Study Despite underestimation and undertreatment of women’s pain and the pervasiveness and destructiveness of sexual assault in women’s lives, no research has directly measured how labels such as “survivor” and “victim” might influence the perceived psychological pain of women who have experienced sexual assault. In the current study, we test for main and interactive effects of crime type and label in predicting perceptions of psychological pain, hardship, and support needed. Specifically, we chose crimes that differ in whether they involve sexual violence and physical violence (i.e., sexual assault), physical violence (i.e., mugging), or neither kind of violence (i.e., identity theft), as well as three labels comprising two common labels (i.e., survivor and victim) and one less-studied formulation (i.e., person-first language, such as “person who has experienced sexual assault”). Teasing apart these distinctions could have important implications for our understanding of biases regarding women’s pain in general, and in the understudied domain of biases regarding pain in sexual assault in particular. Given prior research showing that sexual assault is perceived as an especially severe crime, we hypothesized a main effect of crime type, such that sexual assault, as it involves both sexual and physical violation, would be perceived as related to the most psychological pain and hardship, followed by mugging (a physical but non-sexual crime), and then identity theft. We also hypothesize that survivors of sexual assault, relative to victims of sexual assault, will be perceived as having experienced more hardship, being less sensitive to and in less psychological pain, and needing less social support (Cheek et al., 2023). Given the novelty of the “person who has experienced” label and of our approach combining crime types and labels, we did not formulate specific hypotheses for this label. We also did not formulate specific hypotheses for interaction patterns between crime type and label. However, we theorized that the connotations of the labels could vary by crime type, as the crimes and labels utilized in our study vary significantly in key characteristics (e.g., perceived severity for crimes, personality traits for labels). Methods Participants Participants were 203 undergraduate students ( M age = 19.65, SD = 1.66) drawn from the psychology department subject pool at a private university in the Mountain West region. Most participants identified as women (60.3% women, 36.3% men, 2.9% non-binary, 0.5% genderqueer, 0.5% not sure, and 0.5% did not want to say). Most participants identified as White (72.4% White, 11.3% Latino/a, 3.4% East Asian, 2.0% South Asian, 3.0% as Black/African American, and 4.4% biracial or multiracial). A sensitivity power analysis conducted in G*Power (Faul et al., 2009 ; 1 − β = 0.95; α = .05; repeated-measures analysis of variance [ANOVA] with three groups and three measurements) indicated this sample could detect an effect size of f = 0.11 or greater. Procedure All study procedures were approved by the Institutional Review Board of the [MASKED FOR ANONYMOUS REVIEW]. The study was programmed in Qualtrics. After consent, participants viewed 18 profiles, each consisting of a single-sentence description paired with a different face from the Chicago Face Database (Ma et al., 2015 ). The faces closest to the mean in attractiveness among White women were selected, such that the 9 faces below and 9 faces above the mean were used. In a randomized and fully crossed design, nine of the single-sentence descriptions manipulated crime type and label by incorporating one of three labels: “victim”, “survivor”, “person who has experienced ____,” and one of three crime types: mugging, identity theft, sexual assault. As example of one single-sentence description is “I am a person who has experienced sexual assault.” The other nine single-sentence descriptions served as distractors and included neither a crime nor a label (e.g., “I work as a nurse in a local hospital”). Each participant viewed all 18 single-sentence descriptions in a random order. The face paired with each single-sentence description was randomly selected without replacement from the total pool of 18 faces for each participant. Participants were asked to “consider each profile carefully before responding to a series of questions regarding how you think each woman would experience the world.” A profile remained on the screen while participants completed all of the following measures for that profile. First, participants rated the amount of psychological pain they perceived the target to be experiencing on a five-point Likert scale from “No pain” to “Extreme pain” ( M = 2.68, SD = 0.58). Second, they rated the target’s psychological pain sensitivity on a five-point Likert scale from “Not sensitive at all” to “Extremely sensitive” ( M = 2.92, SD = 0.52). Third, they responded to the question “How important is it that this person receive social support from others?” on a five-point Likert scale from “Not important” to “Extremely important” ( M = 3.52, SD = 0.70). Then, on a seven-point Likert scale from “None” to “A lot”, they responded to three questions regarding how much hardship the target had encountered in her lifetime, how much she had overcome, and how much she was currently enduring, in keeping with previous utilizations (e.g. Summers et al., 2021 ) of Trawalter and colleagues’ ( 2012 ) hardship measure. The three hardship items were highly correlated (all r s > .60 and significant at p < .001) and were averaged into an overall hardship score ( M = 5.67; SD = 1.51; Cronbach’s alpha = .88). After completing all measures for all 18 profiles, participants provided demographic information. No data quality check questions were administered. Analytic Plan First, we explored correlations among the outcome variables in the study. Then, of primary interest, we ran 3 (crime type: sexual assault, identity theft, mugging) by 3 (label: victim, survivor, person) repeated-measures factorial ANOVAs on hardship, current psychological pain experiencing, psychological pain sensitivity, and importance of social support. When interactions emerged, Bonferroni corrected pairwise comparisons were conducted to assess differences within each label by crime type and (in Supplemental Analyses) each crime type by label. Results The outcome variables in the study showed generally moderate positive correlations with each other (see Table 1 ). Table 1 Bivariate correlations between dependent variables. HRD PP PS SS Hardship (HRD) - .57*** .28** .59*** Psychological Pain (PP) - .55*** .53*** Psychological Pain Sensitivity (PS) - .51*** Social Support (SS) - ** p < .01; *** p < .001 Hardship There was no significant main effect of crime type ( F (201) = .95, p = .387, η 2 = .01), but there was a significant main effect of label ( F (203) = 3.38, p = .036, η 2 = .03) such that profiles with the label survivor ( M = 5.89, SE = .13) were attributed the most hardship, followed by victim ( M = 5.63, SE = .13), and then by the person-first label ( M = 5.58, SE = .12). Survivor was significantly different from victim and person, p s < .032, but the pairwise comparison between victim and person did not reach significance, p = .593. A significant interaction between crime type and label was also observed ( F (199) = 4.10, p = .003, η 2 = .08; see Fig. 1 ). To decompose the label by crime type interaction, we examined the simple effects of label at each crime type. The simple effect of label was significant for sexual assault ( F (201) = 3.28, p = .040, η 2 = .03) and mugging ( F (202) = 12.61, p < .001, η 2 = .06), but not for identity theft ( F (201) = 1.80, p = .168, η 2 = .02). For sexual assault, a sexual assault victim was perceived as having experienced the most hardship ( M = 5.93, SE = .18), followed by a sexual assault survivor ( M = 5.64, SE = .18) and a person who has experienced sexual assault ( M = 5.38, SE = .18). The sexual assault victim’s hardship was perceived as significantly higher than that of the person who has experienced sexual assault, p = .011; no other pairwise comparisons were significant, p s > .189. For mugging, a mugging survivor was perceived as having experienced the most hardship ( M = 6.11, SE = .18), followed by a person who has experienced a mugging ( M = 5.40, SE = .17) and a mugging victim ( M = 5.40, SE = .17). A mugging survivor had experienced significantly more hardship than the other two mugging labels, p s .99. Current Psychological Pain There was a significant main effect of crime type, F (203) = 17.08, p < .001, η 2 = .15, such that identity theft ( M = 2.87, SE = .05) was associated with the most current psychological pain, followed by sexual assault ( M = 2.67, SE = .06), and then identity theft ( M = 2.87, SE = .05), p s < .046. There was also a significant main effect of label, F (203) = 4.80, p = .009, η 2 = .05, such that a person who has experienced a crime ( M = 2.61, SE = .06) was seen as experiencing more current psychological pain than a survivor ( M = 2.78, SE = .05), p = .01. The victim of a crime ( M = 2.66, SE = .05) fell in between the person and survivor labels and did not significantly differ from the other labels ( p s > .103). Finally, there was a significant interaction between crime type and label, F (203) = 6.43, p < .001, η 2 = .12; see Fig. 2 . To decompose the label by crime type interaction, we examined the simple effects of label at each crime type. We observed a simple effect of label for sexual assault ( F (203) = 8.94, p < .001, η 2 = .08) and mugging ( F (203) = 7.94, p < .001, η 2 = .07), but not for identity theft, F (203) = 2.08, p = .127, η 2 = .02. Turning to the significant simple effect of label for sexual assault, victim elicited the highest ratings of current psychological pain ( M = 2.88, SE = .08), followed by survivor ( M = 2.66, SE = .08), followed by person ( M = 2.46, SE = .08). The pairwise comparison between person and victim labels was significant ( p .071). Turning to the significant simple effect of label for mugging, survivor elicited the highest ratings of current psychological pain ( M = 2.73, SE = .08), followed by person ( M = 2.45, SE = .08), and victim ( M = 2.36, SE = .07). The pairwise comparisons between survivor and the other two labels were significant ( p s .999). Psychological Pain Sensitivity There was a significant main effect of crime type ( F (203) = 14.82, p < .001, η 2 = .13), such that identity theft ( M = 3.08, SE = .05) was associated with the most sensitivity, followed by sexual assault ( M = 2.90, SE = .05) and then mugging ( M = 2.79, SE = .05) Identity theft was associated with significantly more psychological pain sensitivity than the other two crimes, p s < .002, while sexual assault and mugging did not significantly differ from each other, p = .192. There was also a main effect of label ( F (203) = 6.97, p = .001, η 2 = .07), such that a survivor ( M = 3.02, SE = .05) was seen as having the most sensitivity, followed by a victim ( M = 2.91, SE = .05) and a person who has experienced a crime ( M = 2.84, SE = .04). A survivor was perceived as significantly more sensitive to psychological pain than a person who has experienced a crime, p .072. Finally, there was a significant interaction between crime type and label, F (203) = 3.00, p = .020, η 2 = .06; see Fig. 3 ). To decompose the label by crime type interaction, we examined the simple effects of label at each crime type. We observed a simple effect of label for sexual assault ( F (203) = 4.13, p = .017, η 2 = .04) and identity theft ( F (203) = 6.81, p = .001, η 2 = .06)), but not for mugging ( F (203) = .05, p = .953, η 2 = .00). Turning to the simple effect of label for sexual assault survivor elicited the highest ratings of psychological pain sensitivity ( M = 2.99, SE = .07), followed by victim ( M = 2.96, SE = .07), followed by person ( M = 2.73, SE = .07). In the case of sexual assault, the pairwise comparison between person and survivor labels was significant ( p = .022); no other comparisons achieved significance, p s > .062. Turning to the simple effect of label for identity theft, a survivor of identity theft was seen as most sensitive to psychological pain ( M = 3.29, SE = .08), followed by a person who has experienced identity theft ( M = 3.00, SE = .07) and a victim of identity ( M = 2.96, SE = .07). The victim and person were perceived as less sensitive to psychological pain than a survivor of identity theft, p s .99. Social Support There was a significant main effect of crime type ( F (203) = 6.42, p = .002, η 2 = .06), such that identity theft ( M = 3.63, SE = .06) was associated with the most perceived need for social support, followed by sexual assault ( M = 3.51, SE = .06) and then mugging ( M = 3.43, SE = .06). Identity theft was associated with significantly more social support needed than mugging, p = .002, and no other pairwise comparisons among crime types were significant, p s > .084. We did not observe a significant main effect for label ( F (203) = 1.89, p = .154, η 2 = .02), nor a significant interaction effect ( F (203) = 1.52, p = .198, η 2 = .03; see Fig. 4 ). Discussion In designing this study, we hypothesized that sexual assault would be perceived as related to the most psychological pain and hardship, followed by mugging and then identity theft. We also hypothesized that survivors of sexual assault, relative to victims of sexual assault, will be perceived as having experienced more hardship, being less sensitive to and having less current psychological pain, and needing less social support. Our findings were generally unsupported, with interesting implications for our understanding of how sexual assault labels affect hardship and psychological pain perceptions. The survivor label was associated with more hardship than the victim and person labels, but this effect also differed by crime types. A sexual assault victim was perceived to have experienced more hardship than a person who has experienced sexual assault, while a mugging survivor was seen as having experienced more hardship than a mugging victim or a person who has experienced a mugging. Regarding current psychological pain, study participants perceived identity theft as entailing more pain than the other two crimes, and the person label with significantly more pain than the survivor label. Within the crime of sexual assault, a sexual assault victim was perceived as having more psychological pain than a person who has experienced sexual assault; meanwhile, a mugging survivor was perceived as having more psychological pain than the other two mugging labels. Regarding psychological pain sensitivity, targets of identity theft were perceived as more sensitive than targets of the other two crimes. Survivors in general, and survivors of identity theft in particular, were seen as the most sensitive to psychological pain; finally, sexual assault survivors were seen as more sensitive to psychological pain than a person who has experienced sexual assault. At the level of main effects, the survivor label was perceived as being more sensitive to psychological pain and facing more hardship than the other labels. Prior research suggests that the survivor label carries connotations of both greater injury and greater resilience (e.g., Hockett & Saucier, 2015 ; Papendick & Bohner, 2017 ), a pattern borne out to an extent by these findings. However, these findings, as well as the positive bivariate correlation between hardship and pain sensitivity across all conditions, fail to conform to the hardship bias (Hoffman & Trawalter, 2016 ), which suggests that more hardship would be associated with less pain sensitivity. Since the hardship bias has been applied mostly to understand differences across identities, these findings suggest it may operate differently in the context of experiencing crime victimization. Within the crime of sexual assault, our hypotheses regarding sexual assault survivors were unsupported. Rather, victims of sexual assault were perceived as experiencing more psychological pain and facing more hardship than a person who has experienced sexual assault, while sexual assault survivors were generally not statistically different from the other labels. Victims of sexual assault may be perceived as more severely impacted and suffering more because of the connotations of victimhood (Boyle & Rogers, 2020 ; Schwark & Bohner, 2019 ). It is also possible that the victim label, in the context of sexual assault, connotes an especially painful or difficult experience. Indeed, for mugging and identity theft, different patterns by label emerged, typically with survivor eliciting stronger pain and hardship judgments relative to victim and person. Given the novelty of person-first language (Bednarek & Bray, 2023 ) and its uptake in healthcare settings (Crocker & Smith, 2019 ), we included it in our study to better understand its potential implications for perceptions of hardship, psychological pain, and support needs. We found that person-first language did not demonstrate a clear pattern in comparison to the other labels. Focusing again on sexual assault, although differences were not always significant, a person who has experienced sexual assault received the lowest scores, relative to the other sexual assault labels, across all outcomes. While there is little preexisting literature against which to compare this observation, a recent study found that use of identity-first language in the scientific literature was associated with the authors’ use of more emotional terms to refer to patients (Ricciutti & Davis, 2024 ). Here, person-first language might have a neutralizing effect on what is otherwise understood to be a highly emotionally distressing experience. In this study, we did not assess for participants’ stigmatizing attitudes toward specific crimes or labels, but future research could explore the possibility that person-first language impacts perceptions of targets of crime by reducing stigmatization. An extension of these methods in future work might also attempt to account for differences in fluency or explore whether fluency plays a role in psychological responses to crime and label combinations. Limitations and Future Directions Our participants were drawn from a psychology department research participant pool and are relatively homogenous in sociodemographic terms, and as such their perceptions are of limited generalizability. There would be considerable public health implications to seeing whether these patterns replicate in individuals who work in medical and legal settings, as their perceptions of labels and crime types are of more direct consequence. That said, our mostly college-age and women-identified sample may represent the individuals most likely to provide social support, as college-age women are the demographic most likely to experience sexual assault (Basile et al., 2022 ), so their voices are an important and salient starting point. Our study design aimed to capture differences in perceptions of labels and crime types; to minimize the potential effects of other variables, we did not vary by characteristics such as gender, race, or facial expressions. Future research should consider how these variables may interact with crime types and labels to influence perceptions of crime targets, as intersectional effects of these characteristics are known to exist in pain perceptions and medical care (Wandner et al., 2012 ) and this study utilized only white women targets. Additionally, the labels, crime types, and combinations thereof in our study design likely vary widely in their characteristics and familiarity to participants, making it difficult to surmise which differences among them might drive differential perceptions. For example, across analyses, participants tended to perceive identity theft to involve more psychological pain, inspire greater psychological pain sensitivity, and invoke greater need for social support than the other crimes. As a non-physical, non-sexual crime, we expected identity theft to be perceived as less psychologically painful and requiring less social support (Stylianou, 2003 ). Perhaps this unexpected finding does not indicate participants view identity theft as the most severe crime, but rather as unresolved (i.e., identity theft may be perceived as an ongoing rather than past event, making it more painful in present time). Future research could vary the participants’ purported relationship with the target or ensure all crimes are understood to have begun and ended within an equivalent timeframe. Conclusion This study demonstrated that the labels used for the targets of sexual assault are associated with different perceptions of hardship and psychological pain. A sexual assault victim was perceived to have experienced more hardship and have more current psychological pain than a person who has experienced sexual assault, while sexual assault survivors were seen as more sensitive to psychological pain than a person who has experienced sexual assault. In the context of healthcare and legal systems in which women’s pain and experiences of sexual assault continue to be disbelieved, downplayed, and discredited, more research must be undertaken to better understand the connotations these labels carry and ensure that women who experience sexual assault receive the care they need. Declarations Ethical Approval Ethical approval was obtained from the Institutional Review Board of the [redacted for anonymous review], as mentioned in the paper; this research was conducted in accordance with the norms of the Declaration of Helsinki. Consent to Participate Participants read a consent form and electronically gave consent prior to participation. Competing Interests The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Clinical Trial Number This project was not a clinical trial and accordingly has no clinical trial number. Funding The authors did not receive any funding for this study. Author Contribution C.H. conceptualized the study, implemented data collection, analyzed the data, and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. G.P. assisted with study conceptualization and manuscript preparation and editing. P.L. conceptualized the study and assisted with data collection and analysis and manuscript preparation and editing. All authors reviewed the manuscript. Data Availability Data are available from the authors upon request. References Adriaenssen, A., Paoli, L., Karstedt, S., Visschers, J., Greenfield, V. A., & Pleysier, S. (2020). Public perceptions of the seriousness of crime: Weighing the harm and the wrong. European Journal of Criminology , 17 (2), 127-150. Akdeniz, G. (2020). What makes a crime serious? Testing Warr’s model of offence seriousness. Journal of Penal Law and Criminology , 8 (1), 1-31. Ashford, R., Brown, A., & Curtis, B. (2018). 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Measuring crime seriousness perceptions: What have we learned and what else do we want to know. Journal of Criminal Justice , 31 (1), 37-56. Summers, K. M., Lloyd, E. P., Deska, J. C., Almaraz, S. M., & Hugenberg, K. (2021). Poverty and pain: Low-SES people are believed to be insensitive to pain. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 95 , 104–116. Summers, K. M., Paganini, G. A., & Lloyd, E. P. (2023). Poor toddlers feel less pain? Application of class-based pain stereotypes in judgments of children. Social Psychological and Personality Science , 14 (2), 130-140. Trawalter, S., Hoffman, K. M., & Waytz, A. (2012). Racial bias in perceptions of others’ pain. PLOS ONE, 11 (3), Article e0152334. Traxler, B., Nicks, S., Puckett, M., Dunn, K., Croff, J. M., & Hartwell, M. (2021). The use of person-centered language in scientific research articles focusing on opioid use disorder. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 228 , Article 108965. Van Dijk, J.J.M. (2009), Free the victim: A critique of the Western conception of victimhood. International Review of Victimology, 16 (1), 1–33. Wandner, L. D., Scipio, C. D., Hirsh, A. T., Torres, C. A., & Robinson, M. E. (2012). The perception of pain in others: how gender, race, and age influence pain expectations. The Journal of Pain , 13 (3), 220-227. Waters, H. R., Hyder, A. A., Rajkotia, Y., Basu, S., & Butchart, A. (2005). The costs of interpersonal violence—an international review. Health Policy , 73 (3), 303-315. Wolfgang, M. E. (1985). The national survey of crime severity . US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. Zhang, L., Losin, E. A. R., Ashar, Y. K., Koban, L., & Wager, T. D. (2021). Gender biases in estimation of others' pain. The Journal of Pain , 22 (9), 1048-1059. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain.2021.03.001 Additional Declarations No competing interests reported. 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2","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":24099,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eInteraction of Crime Type and Label in Predicting Current Psychological Pain.\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"2.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7566603/v1/0a2fb7a3967a9b9c631f3368.png"},{"id":92739761,"identity":"0f751a07-3b0a-4c22-b98c-f574a01e0b72","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-10-03 17:10:39","extension":"png","order_by":3,"title":"Figure 3","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":22235,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eInteraction of Crime Type and Label in Predicting Psychological Pain Sensitivity.\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"3.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7566603/v1/5b3fbf5fc664e316727f53c2.png"},{"id":92740102,"identity":"cea0db67-ff57-4dda-9397-136f42382ebf","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-10-03 17:18:39","extension":"png","order_by":4,"title":"Figure 4","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":19242,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eInteraction of Crime Type and Label in Predicting Social Support.\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"4.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7566603/v1/6006a71193986bdf7bd9f969.png"},{"id":92741092,"identity":"6f3f4e18-4e08-41b0-b851-6beb05bf1489","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-10-03 17:27:03","extension":"pdf","order_by":0,"title":"","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"manuscript-pdf","size":844375,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"","description":"","filename":"manuscript.pdf","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7566603/v1/2b1d2282-1f13-46e9-89df-522e5f31baf7.pdf"}],"financialInterests":"No competing interests reported.","formattedTitle":"Influence of Sexual Assault Labels on Perceptions of Target Psychological Pain and Hardship","fulltext":[{"header":"Introduction","content":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eHardship\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWomen\u0026rsquo;s pain is routinely underestimated by lay observers and medical practitioners alike (Pronina \u0026amp; Rule, 2014; Zhang et al., 2021), as well as undertreated by medical practitioners (Samulowitz et al., 2018).\u0026nbsp;Women in pain are perceived as complaining and overly emotional (Samulowitz et al., 2018) and people are also more likely to perceive women\u0026rsquo;s pain as exaggerated than men\u0026rsquo;s (Paganini et al., 2023; Schafer et al., 2016). Although most research on disparities in pain perception by gender has focused on pain in general, or physical pain, in particular (Samulowitz et al., 2018), women are commonly believed to be overly dramatizing the negative emotions they experience (Lloyd et al., 2020), suggesting their psychological pain is likely also underestimated and undertreated. One common cause of psychological distress for women is sexual assault (Dworkin et al., 2023; Short et al., 2022), which impacts over a quarter of women (Basile et al., 2022) and is considered among the most severe crimes one can experience (Frieze et al., 1987; Waters et al., 2005). However, minimal research has explored perceptions of the psychological pain of women who are victims of crime, and in particular women who have experienced sexual assault.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn the current work, we are interested in perceptions of women\u0026rsquo;s psychological pain following a sexual assault. One understudied but potentially relevant factor in perceptions of women\u0026rsquo;s pain in this context are the labels used to identify targets of sexual assault, such as victim and survivor, which carry distinct connotations (Boyle \u0026amp; Rogers, 2020; Schwark \u0026amp; Bohner, 2019). The current study seeks to better understand where and how biases in psychological pain perception and support needs may occur for the targets of sexual assault by comparing the effects of different labels (e.g., victim, survivor, person who has experienced a crime) and different crime types (e.g., sexual assault, identity theft, mugging) on perceptions of women\u0026rsquo;s pain and hardship.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eHardship Bias in Pain Perceptions\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA growing evidence base of social psychological research indicates that perceiving someone to have experienced hardship leads perceivers to believe they are less sensitive to pain (Deska et al., 2020; Dore et al., 2017; Hoffman \u0026amp; Trawalter, 2016; Summers et al., 2023), which can carry negative downstream consequences for medical treatment (Bernardes et al., 2021). Research examining hardship bias in pain perceptions has primarily focused on differences in perceived hardship across target identities (e.g., race or SES), whereas there is presently a dearth of work examining how this hardship bias is applied in judgments of individuals who have experienced sexual assault. In the most relevant work to date, Cheek and colleagues (2023) found that low- relative to high-SES women, who are perceived to have overcome more hardship, are expected to experience less pain and need less social support in response to workplace sexual harassment. Taking the abundant research on gender bias in pain perceptions and the limited research on pain perceptions around sexual violence together, it seems likely that perceptions of hardship might play an important biasing role in perceptions of women\u0026rsquo;s psychological pain in this context. The current work further considers whether perceived hardship and perceived psychological pain in a sexual assault context are variable based on the labels used.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eLabels for Sexual Assault\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLabels can be defined as collectively held mental representations of people or groups; particularly when a label is used to indicate some kind of group membership, such as one\u0026rsquo;s nationality, gender, or race, it may lead to an individual being perceived as embodying essential characteristics of that category (Haslam \u0026amp; Rothschild, 2000; Moradi et al., 2012). Labels used to describe people who have been the targets of violence are no exception: they appear to confer specific, and somewhat distinct, expectations regarding that individual\u0026rsquo;s psychological and physical state, as well as influence other\u0026rsquo;s perceptions of the individual (Hockett \u0026amp; Saucier, 2015).\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe labels typically used to describe the targets of sexual assault, \u0026ldquo;victim\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;survivor\u0026rdquo;, are sometimes described as conferring opposing traits (Boyle \u0026amp; Rogers, 2020; Schwark \u0026amp; Bohner, 2019; Setia et al., 2020). The label of victim may lead perceivers to see the target as passive and having been oppressed and is more likely to garner sympathy and compassion (Lamb, 1999; Mardorossian, 2014; Van Dijk, 2009). The victim label may elicit more sympathy because it seems also to be associated with helplessness and therefore less blame (Dunn, 2005). Conversely, the label of survivor seems to connote empowerment and agency, power, and resilience (Boyle \u0026amp; Rogers, 2020; Schwark \u0026amp; Bohner, 2019). Survivors may be seen as experiencing more hardship, perhaps because the event was especially severe (O\u0026rsquo;Shea et al., 2024; Setia \u0026amp; An, 2022), and as therefore being inured to pain and requiring less support. Accordingly, we hypothesize that women labeled as \u0026ldquo;survivors\u0026rdquo; compared to \u0026ldquo;victims\u0026rdquo; of sexual assault will be perceived as having experienced more hardship, as being less sensitive to pain and in less pain, and as needing less social support.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBy contrast, the label \u0026ldquo;person who has experienced sexual assault\u0026rdquo; has not, to our knowledge, been studied in peer-reviewed research. Prior research incorporating \u0026ldquo;person-first\u0026rdquo; language has looked primarily at perceptions of people with stigmatized identities relating to crime perpetration or mental illness; this study is among the first to consider how person-first language influences perceptions of the targets of crime. Thus far, research links person-first language to moderate effect sizes on reduced stigmatization for specific categories such as substance abuse (Ashford et al., 2018; Baker et al., 2022) and for mental illness more generally (Granello \u0026amp; Gibbs, 2016; Granello \u0026amp; Gorby, 2021), as well as smaller effect sizes for people who have committed crimes (Denver et al., 2017; Jackl, 2023). At the same time, some studies suggest that person-first language does not influence stigmatizing attitudes toward people with disabilities (Feldman et al., 2002; Lynch \u0026amp; Groombridge, 1994). As person-first language remains a contested but growing phenomenon in healthcare settings (Gernsbacher, 2017), but prior research has not related it to the constructs in this study, we include the label in our design but refrain from making any hypotheses about how it will differ from the survivor and victim labels.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eRole of Crime Type\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhether target labels matter for pain perceptions is an open question not just for sexual assault, but for targets of crime more generally. In other words, the impact of labels such as victim and survivor may differ according to the crime committed. Sexual assault is perceived as an especially harmful crime; for example, Adriaenessen and colleagues (2020) found that sexual assault was perceived as more severe and more harmful than any other physically damaging or property damaging crimes (e.g., physical assault, burglary, corporate fraud) apart from murder and terrorism. In a recent survey, 61% of respondents thought that rape and homicide were equally severe crimes (Felson \u0026amp; Silver, 2024). This has led some authors (e.g., Akdeniz, 2020) to suggest a combinatorial effect of the physical and sexual violation of sexual assault in terms of bodily harm. Comparing sexual assault to other crimes offers the opportunity to contribute more broadly to our understanding of the survivor and victim labels and may offer insights into why these labels are differentially perceived within the context of sexual assault.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eThe Current Study\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDespite underestimation and undertreatment of women\u0026rsquo;s pain and the pervasiveness and destructiveness of sexual assault in women\u0026rsquo;s lives, no research has directly measured how labels such as \u0026ldquo;survivor\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;victim\u0026rdquo; might influence the perceived psychological pain of women who have experienced sexual assault. In the current study, we test for main and interactive effects of crime type and label in predicting perceptions of psychological pain, hardship, and support needed. Specifically, we chose crimes that differ in whether they involve sexual violence and physical violence (i.e., sexual assault), physical violence (i.e., mugging), or neither kind of violence (i.e., identity theft), as well as three labels comprising two common labels (i.e., survivor and victim) and one less-studied formulation (i.e., person-first language, such as \u0026ldquo;person who has experienced sexual assault\u0026rdquo;). Teasing apart these distinctions could have important implications for our understanding of biases regarding women\u0026rsquo;s pain in general, and in the understudied domain of biases regarding pain in sexual assault in particular.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGiven prior research showing that sexual assault is perceived as an especially severe crime, we hypothesized a main effect of crime type, such that sexual assault, as it involves both sexual and physical violation, would be perceived as related to the most psychological pain and hardship, followed by mugging (a physical but non-sexual crime), and then identity theft. We also hypothesize that survivors of sexual assault, relative to victims of sexual assault, will be perceived as having experienced more hardship, being less sensitive to and in less psychological pain, and needing less social support (Cheek et al., 2023). Given the novelty of the \u0026ldquo;person who has experienced\u0026rdquo; label and of our approach combining crime types and labels, we did not formulate specific hypotheses for this label. We also did not formulate specific hypotheses for interaction patterns between crime type and label. However, we theorized that the connotations of the labels could vary by crime type, as the crimes and labels utilized in our study vary significantly in key characteristics (e.g., perceived severity for crimes, personality traits for labels).\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Methods","content":"\u003cdiv id=\"Sec7\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003eParticipants\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eParticipants were 203 undergraduate students (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u003csub\u003eage\u003c/sub\u003e = 19.65, \u003cem\u003eSD\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;1.66) drawn from the psychology department subject pool at a private university in the Mountain West region. Most participants identified as women (60.3% women, 36.3% men, 2.9% non-binary, 0.5% genderqueer, 0.5% not sure, and 0.5% did not want to say). Most participants identified as White (72.4% White, 11.3% Latino/a, 3.4% East Asian, 2.0% South Asian, 3.0% as Black/African American, and 4.4% biracial or multiracial). A sensitivity power analysis conducted in G*Power (Faul et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR17\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2009\u003c/span\u003e; 1\u0026thinsp;\u0026minus;\u0026thinsp;β\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;0.95; α\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.05; repeated-measures analysis of variance [ANOVA] with three groups and three measurements) indicated this sample could detect an effect size of \u003cem\u003ef\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;0.11 or greater.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Sec8\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003eProcedure\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eAll study procedures were approved by the Institutional Review Board of the [MASKED FOR ANONYMOUS REVIEW]. The study was programmed in Qualtrics. After consent, participants viewed 18 profiles, each consisting of a single-sentence description paired with a different face from the Chicago Face Database (Ma et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR31\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2015\u003c/span\u003e). The faces closest to the mean in attractiveness among White women were selected, such that the 9 faces below and 9 faces above the mean were used. In a randomized and fully crossed design, nine of the single-sentence descriptions manipulated crime type and label by incorporating one of three labels: \u0026ldquo;victim\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;survivor\u0026rdquo;, \u0026ldquo;person who has experienced ____,\u0026rdquo; and one of three crime types: mugging, identity theft, sexual assault. As example of one single-sentence description is \u0026ldquo;I am a person who has experienced sexual assault.\u0026rdquo; The other nine single-sentence descriptions served as distractors and included neither a crime nor a label (e.g., \u0026ldquo;I work as a nurse in a local hospital\u0026rdquo;). Each participant viewed all 18 single-sentence descriptions in a random order. The face paired with each single-sentence description was randomly selected without replacement from the total pool of 18 faces for each participant.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eParticipants were asked to \u0026ldquo;consider each profile carefully before responding to a series of questions regarding how you think each woman would experience the world.\u0026rdquo; A profile remained on the screen while participants completed all of the following measures for that profile. First, participants rated the amount of psychological pain they perceived the target to be experiencing on a five-point Likert scale from \u0026ldquo;No pain\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;Extreme pain\u0026rdquo; (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.68, \u003cem\u003eSD\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;0.58). Second, they rated the target\u0026rsquo;s psychological pain sensitivity on a five-point Likert scale from \u0026ldquo;Not sensitive at all\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;Extremely sensitive\u0026rdquo; (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.92, \u003cem\u003eSD\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;0.52). Third, they responded to the question \u0026ldquo;How important is it that this person receive social support from others?\u0026rdquo; on a five-point Likert scale from \u0026ldquo;Not important\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;Extremely important\u0026rdquo; (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;3.52, \u003cem\u003eSD\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;0.70). Then, on a seven-point Likert scale from \u0026ldquo;None\u0026rdquo; to \u0026ldquo;A lot\u0026rdquo;, they responded to three questions regarding how much hardship the target had encountered in her lifetime, how much she had overcome, and how much she was currently enduring, in keeping with previous utilizations (e.g. Summers et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR49\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e) of Trawalter and colleagues\u0026rsquo; (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR51\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2012\u003c/span\u003e) hardship measure. The three hardship items were highly correlated (all \u003cem\u003er\u003c/em\u003es\u0026thinsp;\u0026gt;\u0026thinsp;.60 and significant at \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.001) and were averaged into an overall hardship score (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;5.67; \u003cem\u003eSD\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;1.51; Cronbach\u0026rsquo;s alpha\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.88). After completing all measures for all 18 profiles, participants provided demographic information. No data quality check questions were administered.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eAnalytic Plan\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFirst, we explored correlations among the outcome variables in the study. Then, of primary interest, we ran 3 (crime type: sexual assault, identity theft, mugging) by 3 (label: victim, survivor, person) repeated-measures factorial ANOVAs on hardship, current psychological pain experiencing, psychological pain sensitivity, and importance of social support. When interactions emerged, Bonferroni corrected pairwise comparisons were conducted to assess differences within each label by crime type and (in Supplemental Analyses) each crime type by label.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Results","content":"\u003cp\u003eThe outcome variables in the study showed generally moderate positive correlations with each other (see Table\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Tab1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"gridtable\"\u003e\u003ctable float=\"Yes\" id=\"Tab1\" border=\"1\"\u003e\u003ccaption language=\"En\"\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionNumber\"\u003eTable 1\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv class=\"CaptionContent\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eBivariate correlations between dependent variables.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/caption\u003e\u003ccolgroup cols=\"5\"\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c1\" colnum=\"1\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c2\" colnum=\"2\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c3\" colnum=\"3\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c4\" colnum=\"4\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv align=\"left\" class=\"colspec\" colname=\"c5\" colnum=\"5\"\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cthead\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eHRD\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ePP\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ePS\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003cth align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eSS\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/th\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/thead\u003e\u003ctbody\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eHardship (HRD)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e.57***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e.28**\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e.59***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ePsychological Pain (PP)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e.55***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e.53***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003ePsychological Pain Sensitivity (PS)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e.51***\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003eSocial Support (SS)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e-\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003ctr\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c1\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e** \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.01; *** \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.001\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c2\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c3\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c4\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003ctd align=\"left\" colname=\"c5\"\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/td\u003e\u003c/tr\u003e\u003c/tbody\u003e\u003c/colgroup\u003e\u003c/table\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Sec11\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003eHardship\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere was no significant main effect of crime type (\u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(201)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.95, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.387, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.01), but there was a significant main effect of label (\u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(203)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;3.38, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.036, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.03) such that profiles with the label survivor (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;5.89, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.13) were attributed the most hardship, followed by victim (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;5.63, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.13), and then by the person-first label (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;5.58, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.12). Survivor was significantly different from victim and person, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003es\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.032, but the pairwise comparison between victim and person did not reach significance, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.593. A significant interaction between crime type and label was also observed (\u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(199)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;4.10, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.003, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.08; see Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo decompose the label by crime type interaction, we examined the simple effects of label at each crime type. The simple effect of label was significant for sexual assault (\u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(201)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;3.28, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.040, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.03) and mugging (\u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(202)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;12.61, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.001, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.06), but not for identity theft (\u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(201)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;1.80, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.168, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.02). For sexual assault, a sexual assault victim was perceived as having experienced the most hardship (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;5.93, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.18), followed by a sexual assault survivor (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;5.64, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.18) and a person who has experienced sexual assault (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;5.38, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.18). The sexual assault victim\u0026rsquo;s hardship was perceived as significantly higher than that of the person who has experienced sexual assault, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.011; no other pairwise comparisons were significant, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003es\u0026thinsp;\u0026gt;\u0026thinsp;.189. For mugging, a mugging survivor was perceived as having experienced the most hardship (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;6.11, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.18), followed by a person who has experienced a mugging (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;5.40, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.17) and a mugging victim (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;5.40, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.17). A mugging survivor had experienced significantly more hardship than the other two mugging labels, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003es\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.001, which did not differ from each other, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;\u0026gt;\u0026thinsp;.99.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Sec12\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003eCurrent Psychological Pain\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere was a significant main effect of crime type, \u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(203)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;17.08, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.001, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.15, such that identity theft (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.87, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.05) was associated with the most current psychological pain, followed by sexual assault (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.67, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.06), and then identity theft (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.87, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.05), \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003es\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.046. There was also a significant main effect of label, \u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(203)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;4.80, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.009, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.05, such that a person who has experienced a crime (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.61, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.06) was seen as experiencing more current psychological pain than a survivor (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.78, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.05), \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.01. The victim of a crime (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.66, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.05) fell in between the person and survivor labels and did not significantly differ from the other labels (\u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003es\u0026thinsp;\u0026gt;\u0026thinsp;.103). Finally, there was a significant interaction between crime type and label, \u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(203)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;6.43, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.001, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.12; see Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig2\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2\u003c/span\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo decompose the label by crime type interaction, we examined the simple effects of label at each crime type. We observed a simple effect of label for sexual assault (\u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(203)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;8.94, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.001, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.08) and mugging (\u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(203)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;7.94, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.001, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.07), but not for identity theft, \u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(203)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.08, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.127, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.02. Turning to the significant simple effect of label for sexual assault, victim elicited the highest ratings of current psychological pain (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.88, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.08), followed by survivor (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.66, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.08), followed by person (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.46, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.08). The pairwise comparison between person and victim labels was significant (\u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.001); no comparisons involving the survivor label achieved significance (\u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003es\u0026thinsp;\u0026gt;\u0026thinsp;.071). Turning to the significant simple effect of label for mugging, survivor elicited the highest ratings of current psychological pain (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.73, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.08), followed by person (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.45, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.08), and victim (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.36, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.07). The pairwise comparisons between survivor and the other two labels were significant (\u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003es\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.001); the comparison between person and victim was not significant (\u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;\u0026gt;\u0026thinsp;.999).\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Sec13\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003ePsychological Pain Sensitivity\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere was a significant main effect of crime type (\u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(203)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;14.82, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.001, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.13), such that identity theft (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;3.08, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.05) was associated with the most sensitivity, followed by sexual assault (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.90, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.05) and then mugging (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.79, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.05) Identity theft was associated with significantly more psychological pain sensitivity than the other two crimes, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003es\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.002, while sexual assault and mugging did not significantly differ from each other, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.192. There was also a main effect of label (\u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(203)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;6.97, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.001, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.07), such that a survivor (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;3.02, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.05) was seen as having the most sensitivity, followed by a victim (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.91, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.05) and a person who has experienced a crime (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.84, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.04). A survivor was perceived as significantly more sensitive to psychological pain than a person who has experienced a crime, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.001; no other pairwise comparisons were significant, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003es\u0026thinsp;\u0026gt;\u0026thinsp;.072. Finally, there was a significant interaction between crime type and label, \u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(203)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;3.00, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.020, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.06; see Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig3\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e3\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTo decompose the label by crime type interaction, we examined the simple effects of label at each crime type. We observed a simple effect of label for sexual assault (\u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(203)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;4.13, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.017, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.04) and identity theft (\u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(203)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;6.81, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.001, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.06)), but not for mugging (\u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(203)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.05, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.953, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.00). Turning to the simple effect of label for sexual assault survivor elicited the highest ratings of psychological pain sensitivity (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.99, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.07), followed by victim (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.96, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.07), followed by person (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.73, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.07). In the case of sexual assault, the pairwise comparison between person and survivor labels was significant (\u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.022); no other comparisons achieved significance, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003es\u0026thinsp;\u0026gt;\u0026thinsp;.062. Turning to the simple effect of label for identity theft, a survivor of identity theft was seen as most sensitive to psychological pain (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;3.29, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.08), followed by a person who has experienced identity theft (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;3.00, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.07) and a victim of identity (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;2.96, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.07). The victim and person were perceived as less sensitive to psychological pain than a survivor of identity theft, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003es\u0026thinsp;\u0026lt;\u0026thinsp;.008. The victim and person labels for identity theft did not significantly differ from each other in psychological pain sensitivity, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;\u0026gt;\u0026thinsp;.99.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Sec14\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003eSocial Support\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere was a significant main effect of crime type (\u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(203)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;6.42, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.002, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.06), such that identity theft (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;3.63, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.06) was associated with the most perceived need for social support, followed by sexual assault (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;3.51, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.06) and then mugging (\u003cem\u003eM\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;3.43, \u003cem\u003eSE\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.06). Identity theft was associated with significantly more social support needed than mugging, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.002, and no other pairwise comparisons among crime types were significant, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003es\u0026thinsp;\u0026gt;\u0026thinsp;.084. We did not observe a significant main effect for label (\u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(203)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;1.89, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.154, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.02), nor a significant interaction effect (\u003cem\u003eF\u003c/em\u003e(203)\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;1.52, \u003cem\u003ep\u003c/em\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.198, \u003cem\u003eη\u003c/em\u003e\u003csup\u003e2\u003c/sup\u003e\u0026thinsp;=\u0026thinsp;.03; see Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig4\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e4\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e"},{"header":"Discussion","content":"\u003cp\u003eIn designing this study, we hypothesized that sexual assault would be perceived as related to the most psychological pain and hardship, followed by mugging and then identity theft. We also hypothesized that survivors of sexual assault, relative to victims of sexual assault, will be perceived as having experienced more hardship, being less sensitive to and having less current psychological pain, and needing less social support. Our findings were generally unsupported, with interesting implications for our understanding of how sexual assault labels affect hardship and psychological pain perceptions. The survivor label was associated with more hardship than the victim and person labels, but this effect also differed by crime types. A sexual assault victim was perceived to have experienced more hardship than a person who has experienced sexual assault, while a mugging survivor was seen as having experienced more hardship than a mugging victim or a person who has experienced a mugging. Regarding current psychological pain, study participants perceived identity theft as entailing more pain than the other two crimes, and the person label with significantly more pain than the survivor label. Within the crime of sexual assault, a sexual assault victim was perceived as having more psychological pain than a person who has experienced sexual assault; meanwhile, a mugging survivor was perceived as having more psychological pain than the other two mugging labels. Regarding psychological pain sensitivity, targets of identity theft were perceived as more sensitive than targets of the other two crimes. Survivors in general, and survivors of identity theft in particular, were seen as the most sensitive to psychological pain; finally, sexual assault survivors were seen as more sensitive to psychological pain than a person who has experienced sexual assault.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt the level of main effects, the survivor label was perceived as being more sensitive to psychological pain and facing more hardship than the other labels. Prior research suggests that the survivor label carries connotations of both greater injury and greater resilience (e.g., Hockett \u0026amp; Saucier, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR26\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2015\u003c/span\u003e; Papendick \u0026amp; Bohner, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR37\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e), a pattern borne out to an extent by these findings. However, these findings, as well as the positive bivariate correlation between hardship and pain sensitivity across all conditions, fail to conform to the hardship bias (Hoffman \u0026amp; Trawalter, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR27\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e), which suggests that more hardship would be associated with less pain sensitivity. Since the hardship bias has been applied mostly to understand differences across identities, these findings suggest it may operate differently in the context of experiencing crime victimization.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWithin the crime of sexual assault, our hypotheses regarding sexual assault survivors were unsupported. Rather, victims of sexual assault were perceived as experiencing more psychological pain and facing more hardship than a person who has experienced sexual assault, while sexual assault survivors were generally not statistically different from the other labels. Victims of sexual assault may be perceived as more severely impacted and suffering more because of the connotations of victimhood (Boyle \u0026amp; Rogers, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR9\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e; Schwark \u0026amp; Bohner, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR43\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e). It is also possible that the victim label, in the context of sexual assault, connotes an especially painful or difficult experience. Indeed, for mugging and identity theft, different patterns by label emerged, typically with survivor eliciting stronger pain and hardship judgments relative to victim and person.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGiven the novelty of person-first language (Bednarek \u0026amp; Bray, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR6\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e) and its uptake in healthcare settings (Crocker \u0026amp; Smith, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR11\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e), we included it in our study to better understand its potential implications for perceptions of hardship, psychological pain, and support needs. We found that person-first language did not demonstrate a clear pattern in comparison to the other labels. Focusing again on sexual assault, although differences were not always significant, a person who has experienced sexual assault received the lowest scores, relative to the other sexual assault labels, across all outcomes. While there is little preexisting literature against which to compare this observation, a recent study found that use of identity-first language in the scientific literature was associated with the authors\u0026rsquo; use of more emotional terms to refer to patients (Ricciutti \u0026amp; Davis, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR39\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e). Here, person-first language might have a neutralizing effect on what is otherwise understood to be a highly emotionally distressing experience.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this study, we did not assess for participants\u0026rsquo; stigmatizing attitudes toward specific crimes or labels, but future research could explore the possibility that person-first language impacts perceptions of targets of crime by reducing stigmatization. An extension of these methods in future work might also attempt to account for differences in fluency or explore whether fluency plays a role in psychological responses to crime and label combinations.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Sec16\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003eLimitations and Future Directions\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eOur participants were drawn from a psychology department research participant pool and are relatively homogenous in sociodemographic terms, and as such their perceptions are of limited generalizability. There would be considerable public health implications to seeing whether these patterns replicate in individuals who work in medical and legal settings, as their perceptions of labels and crime types are of more direct consequence. That said, our mostly college-age and women-identified sample may represent the individuals most likely to provide social support, as college-age women are the demographic most likely to experience sexual assault (Basile et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR5\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e), so their voices are an important and salient starting point.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOur study design aimed to capture differences in perceptions of labels and crime types; to minimize the potential effects of other variables, we did not vary by characteristics such as gender, race, or facial expressions. Future research should consider how these variables may interact with crime types and labels to influence perceptions of crime targets, as intersectional effects of these characteristics are known to exist in pain perceptions and medical care (Wandner et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR54\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2012\u003c/span\u003e) and this study utilized only white women targets. Additionally, the labels, crime types, and combinations thereof in our study design likely vary widely in their characteristics and familiarity to participants, making it difficult to surmise which differences among them might drive differential perceptions. For example, across analyses, participants tended to perceive identity theft to involve more psychological pain, inspire greater psychological pain sensitivity, and invoke greater need for social support than the other crimes. As a non-physical, non-sexual crime, we expected identity theft to be perceived as less psychologically painful and requiring less social support (Stylianou, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR48\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2003\u003c/span\u003e). Perhaps this unexpected finding does not indicate participants view identity theft as the most severe crime, but rather as unresolved (i.e., identity theft may be perceived as an ongoing rather than past event, making it more painful in present time). Future research could vary the participants\u0026rsquo; purported relationship with the target or ensure all crimes are understood to have begun and ended within an equivalent timeframe.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e"},{"header":"Conclusion","content":"\u003cp\u003eThis study demonstrated that the labels used for the targets of sexual assault are associated with different perceptions of hardship and psychological pain. A sexual assault victim was perceived to have experienced more hardship and have more current psychological pain than a person who has experienced sexual assault, while sexual assault survivors were seen as more sensitive to psychological pain than a person who has experienced sexual assault. In the context of healthcare and legal systems in which women\u0026rsquo;s pain and experiences of sexual assault continue to be disbelieved, downplayed, and discredited, more research must be undertaken to better understand the connotations these labels carry and ensure that women who experience sexual assault receive the care they need.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Declarations","content":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEthical Approval\u003c/strong\u003e\u003cp\u003eEthical approval was obtained from the Institutional Review Board of the [redacted for anonymous review], as mentioned in the paper; this research was conducted in accordance with the norms of the Declaration of Helsinki.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eConsent to Participate\u003c/strong\u003e\u003cp\u003eParticipants read a consent form and electronically gave consent prior to participation.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eCompeting Interests\u003c/strong\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ch2\u003eClinical Trial Number\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis project was not a clinical trial and accordingly has no clinical trial number.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eFunding\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe authors did not receive any funding for this study.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eAuthor Contribution\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eC.H. conceptualized the study, implemented data collection, analyzed the data, and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. G.P. assisted with study conceptualization and manuscript preparation and editing. P.L. conceptualized the study and assisted with data collection and analysis and manuscript preparation and editing. All authors reviewed the manuscript.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eData Availability\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eData are available from the authors upon request.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"References","content":"\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAdriaenssen, A., Paoli, L., Karstedt, S., Visschers, J., Greenfield, V. A., \u0026amp; Pleysier, S. (2020). Public perceptions of the seriousness of crime: Weighing the harm and the wrong. \u003cem\u003eEuropean Journal of Criminology\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e17\u003c/em\u003e(2), 127-150.\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAkdeniz, G. (2020). What makes a crime serious? 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Gender biases in estimation of others\u0026apos; pain. \u003cem\u003eThe Journal of Pain\u003c/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003e22\u003c/em\u003e(9), 1048-1059. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain.2021.03.001\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e"}],"fulltextSource":"","fullText":"","funders":[],"hasAdminPriorityOnWorkflow":false,"hasManuscriptDocX":true,"hasOptedInToPreprint":true,"hasPassedJournalQc":"","hasAnyPriority":false,"hideJournal":true,"highlight":"","institution":"","isAcceptedByJournal":false,"isAuthorSuppliedPdf":false,"isDeskRejected":"","isHiddenFromSearch":false,"isInQc":false,"isInWorkflow":false,"isPdf":false,"isPdfUpToDate":true,"isWithdrawnOrRetracted":false,"journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"researchsquare","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"externalIdentity":"","sideBox":"","snPcode":"","submissionUrl":"/submission","title":"Research Square","twitterHandle":"researchsquare","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":false,"editorialSystem":"","reportingPortfolio":"","inReviewEnabled":false,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":true},"keywords":"","lastPublishedDoi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-7566603/v1","lastPublishedDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-7566603/v1","license":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},"manuscriptAbstract":"\u003cp\u003eWomen\u0026rsquo;s pain is routinely underestimated by lay observers and medical practitioners alike, as well as undertreated. Perceptions of pain and needs for support may be influenced by the hardship bias, in which experiences of hardship are erroneously thought to inoculate against, rather than increase vulnerability to, subsequent experiences of pain. Many women are the targets of sexual violence, but minimal research has explored how perceivers understand the pain and hardship of women who have experienced sexual assault. Furthermore, the labels commonly used for targets of sexual violence (i.e., \u0026ldquo;victim\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;survivor\u0026rdquo;) carry differing connotations that may impact perceptions of pain and hardship, but whether such differential perceptions exist for sexual assault, or for other crimes, is currently unknown. Exploring these distinctions could have important implications for our understanding of how women who have been sexually assaulted are perceived and treated. To that end, we tested for the influence of labels in sexual assault and two other crimes (i.e., mugging and identity theft) on perceptions of psychological pain, hardship, and support needed. Interaction effects of crime type and label were observed for perceived hardship, psychological pain, and sensitivity to psychological pain, indicating that the effects of labels (survivor, victim, person who experienced) on person perception vary by crime type. Taking a closer look at perceptions of sexual assault, victims were perceived to have experienced a higher degree of pain and hardship than several other label and crime combinations. Our findings stress the need for more research to better understand the connotations these labels carry and ensure that women who experience sexual assault receive the care they need.\u003c/p\u003e","manuscriptTitle":"Influence of Sexual Assault Labels on Perceptions of Target Psychological Pain and Hardship","msid":"","msnumber":"","nonDraftVersions":[{"code":1,"date":"2025-10-03 17:10:34","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-7566603/v1","editorialEvents":[{"type":"communityComments","content":0}],"status":"published","journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"researchsquare","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":true,"externalIdentity":"","sideBox":"","snPcode":"","submissionUrl":"/submission","title":"Research Square","twitterHandle":"researchsquare","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":false,"editorialSystem":"","reportingPortfolio":"","inReviewEnabled":false,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":true}}],"origin":"","ownerIdentity":"45ad5241-69bb-4796-beba-aef0505eb709","owner":[],"postedDate":"October 3rd, 2025","published":true,"recentEditorialEvents":[],"rejectedJournal":[],"revision":"","amendment":"","status":"posted","subjectAreas":[],"tags":[],"updatedAt":"2026-02-03T16:54:50+00:00","versionOfRecord":[],"versionCreatedAt":"2025-10-03 17:10:34","video":"","vorDoi":"","vorDoiUrl":"","workflowStages":[]},"version":"v1","identity":"rs-7566603","journalConfig":"researchsquare"},"__N_SSP":true},"page":"/article/[identity]/[[...version]]","query":{"redirect":"/article/rs-7566603","identity":"rs-7566603","version":["v1"]},"buildId":"8U1c8b4HqxoKbykW_rLl7","isFallback":false,"isExperimentalCompile":false,"dynamicIds":[84888],"gssp":true,"scriptLoader":[]}