Without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool.On the Pleasure of Hating, Hazlitt (1826/1995, p. 190)
Hate is one of the strongest human feelings . Some of us struggle with this feeling on an almost daily basis. However, it is not a widely studied subject in the fields of social and behavioral sciences. Part of the reason is because hate is so negative and disturbing a feeling that generally people do not want to talk about it, preferring to ignore it. Yet, its impact and influence is always present at both conscious and unconscious cognitive levels. Neuro-chemists discovered that when we are dealing with negative events, our body produces higher level cortisol, a hormone that shuts down thinking center of our brain and activates conflict aversion and protection behaviors, which eventually makes us to perceive negative events with greater emphasize than actually exists. 1 Similarly, some scholars claim that negative emotions and negativity in general have a deeper impact on human feelings than positive feelings, cognition , and behaviors. Research has revealed that people tend to recall negative events more easily than positive ones and that negative experiences have a deeper impact on people’s attitudes and behaviors than positive ones. 2 This, in turn, can be conceptualized as “negativity bias ”, 3 meaning that people tend to weigh negative experiences in their decisions more heavily than positive ones. 4 Thus, we may be led by our negative and hateful emotions (such as anger, disgust, dislike, and so on) rather than positive emotions (such as love , happiness , compassion, and so on) when we evaluate other people and objects. Or we are at least influenced by negative emotions as much as positive ones, yet we prefer to ignore this very important emotion.
On the one end of the negativity , we have hate , and on the other end of the positivity, we have love . Love and hate are building blocks of our emotional lives. However, non-existence of love doesn’t necessarily indicate hate or vice versa (Sternberg 2003). Neither hate can necessarily be defined as total opposite of love as these two strongest human emotions can also exist together as Sprott (2004, p. 304) discusses “one can love some things about one’s partner and hate others at the same time”. Interestingly enough, in some romantic relationships, the deeper the love between partners, the deeper the hate gets when things didn’t work out. 5 It is ironic to say that but perhaps the love is the source of the hatred we feel in some cases. Either way, having feelings of both hate and love are how people give meaning and reasons to their lives, sometimes in a peaceful way with love and other times in a painful way with hate. However, as human beings, we like to see the positive side and tend to ignore negatives most of the time. We love to love and we hate to hate , and we want to be happy all the time. We do not want to think about negative results and feel hatred, even though it is perhaps sometimes a reasonable and logical outcome of our behaviors. This is in our nature. We want to see happy endings in every event. In other words, we are all programed to think positively—which is, I believe, our main life source. Positive thinking makes us happy and everybody wants to be happy. At certain points, it can be said that we are passively addicted to our happiness. It is like watching Disney movies, which always feature happy endings. Everything should be perfect, and the good guys are always the winners, not the bad guys. We just cannot stand a situation in which a bad guy beats a good guy. That makes us unhappy, and we feel pain and perhaps hatred toward the self-defined bad guy. This is what I call “happy- ending syndrome”. This syndrome is sometimes so blinding that we do not listen to or even like people who always think negatively about events or situations. We are all in search of our own Disney-like happy endings in our lives, and we want to make sure we are not hunted by any negativity . Thus, the question is: Are we drugged with our need for happiness, and do we blind ourselves by thinking positively and denying the negativity and hurtful truth surrounding us, even though we include them in our decision-making processes? At some points, such negativity will drag in hate and we simply do not want to go into that darkness and those hateful feelings. But they are there nonetheless. Perhaps we want to repress some of those negative and hateful feelings and deny the reality.
Showing hate is not acceptable in many societies and cultures, although people might feel hate and all sorts of other negative emotions on a daily basis. Although hate can be seen to be as natural a feeling as love , showing anger and hatred is socially unacceptable and can even be seen as a criminal act in many cultures. In other words, hate is a hidden and mostly repressed feeling and can generally be seen in a passive form in public rather than in active...