Emotional Invalidation: A Comment on Agnew’s General Strain Theory

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This paper integrates the concept of emotional invalidation into Robert Agnew's General Strain Theory (GST). It first briefly discusses Agnew's central argument in GST. It then describes what is meant by emotional invalidation and how GST already comes close to capturing the concept. Next, this paper explains how focusing on emotional invalidation can strengthen GST with little modification to the overall theoretical framework. This paper concludes with recommendations for operationalizing emotional invalidation, as well as some directions for future studies.