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You may hurt the ones you love but forgive and forget is much more likely apply in intimate relationships than it is to your friends, according to research results from The Australian National University, being released as part of National Psychology Week. The study by Clinical Psychology PhD Candidate Jodie Burchell, suggests that although the people that are closest to you have the greatest capacity to hurt your feelings, over time people feel less hurt from events occurring in an intimate relationship than they do from those involving close friends. Her work aims to build on studies that have suggested evolutionary selection favoured those emotions that increased our ancestors chances of surviving and subsequently reproducing. Recent research has suggested that hurt feelings have evolved to signal that a persons inclusion in a group or relationship is in danger. Ms Burchells study is investigating whether the closeness of the relationship with the perpetrator of the hurtful event predicts how hurt a person reports feeling. The study is the first that simultaneously asks people how hurt they have felt when wronged by a romantic partner, a close friend and an acquaintance. The results are drawn from two questionnaires that participants took part in. in the first, participants read stories representing either low or high hurt situations across a range of relationships. In the second, participants recalled the most hurtful thing that their current romantic partner, close friend or acquaintance had done to them.