Can't Let It Go: Hate in Interpersonal Relationships

Abstract

Theories concerning hatred in personal relationships lack empirical evidence. These two studies address the need to provide empirical information about how hate works in interpersonal, loving relationships. Effort justification theory (Aronson & Mills, 1959) suggests that past hate may have a beneficial function in relationships that remain together; however, if hate is a truly destructive motivation (Rempel & Burris, 2005), this hate may have a lasting irreconcilable impact on the quality of the relationship. By surveying people in both the United States and Norway about their personal loving relationships, we discovered that hatred leaves a lasting deleterious impression on interpersonal relationships. People are more likely to report less intimacy, satisfaction, and love with people they have previously hated. Furthermore, effort justification and cognitive dissonance, when measured as relationship length, was observed in the report of higher commitment to those previously hated. Future assessments of relationship quality should consider measuring hatred and length of relationship. Keywords: hate, relationship quality, intimacy, satisfactionMost of the research addressing emotions in intimate and interpersonal relationships focuses on love (e.g., Hatfield & Rapson, 1993) and anger (e.g., Dutton, 2010). However, relationships can have hurtful and damaging qualities that can elicit hate. Surprisingly, there is a lack of research addressing hatred in interpersonal relationships. Much research has been spent on understanding group hatred, specifically hatred towards minorities or other group members (Brewer, 1999;McCann, 2009;Ray & Van Bavel, 2014). And although this research is laudable, the interpersonal dimension of hatred that deals with one's hatred towards another person (despite his/her group membership) has not been fully investigated. There are theoretical approaches to better understanding interpersonal hatred (e.g., Rempel & Burris, 2005;Sternberg, 2003;Sternberg & Sternberg, 2008); however, little empirical research has fully vetted these theories. Historically, much of the research on hatred in psychology comes from a psychoanalytic perspective (Blum, 1997;Kernberg, 1992;Klein, 1975;McKellar, 1950;Moss, 2003;Strasser, 1999;Vitz & Mango, 1997), which focuses more on the theoretical nature of hatred and less on the empirical evidence.The primary purpose of the following studies was to better understand, from an empirical perspective, how interpersonal hatred can affect the quality of the relationship with someone hated. Much of the current literature concerning interpersonal relationships does not consider how ambivalent feelings (like having both hate and love in a relationship) can have an impact on a relationship's satisfaction. Some research does attempt to investigate how hate operates or is defined in a relationship. Fitness and Fletcher (1993) conducted several studies on hate in intimate relationships and concluded that the overall concept of hate in intimate relationships involves low levels o...

Hate: Toward understanding its distinctive features across interpersonal and intergroup targets.

“…At the intergroup level, hate plays a role in for instance intergroup intractable conflicts (Halperin, 2008), political intolerance (Halperin et al, 2009), and war (Halperin et al, 2011). At the interpersonal level, hate has been characterized as the counterpart of love (Aumer et al, 2016; Jin et al, 2017), another strong and long lasting feeling with shared characteristics like its duration and intensity (Ben-Ze’ev, 2018), especially toward close targets (Aumer & Hatfield, 2007). Although there is theoretical agreement on characterizing hate as an intense and enduring emotion intended to harm its targets, its multidimensional nature is still difficult to grasp and is yet unclear.…”

Why We Hate

“…Interestingly, at an interpersonal level, the relationship between hater and hated can be intimate. Studies by Aumer et al (2016) for example show that when individuals were asked to report on a person they currently love but at one time hated in the past, in contrast with a person they loved and never hated, they report in both cases on persons they know very well, such as family members, romantic partners, or colleagues. However, not surprisingly, the quality of the current relationship with the person whom was once hated, was shown to be characterized by less intimacy and love, and more hate.…”

Hateful Emotional Responses Scale (HatERS): Development and Initial Evaluation

“…In addition, three other measures were included for the purposes of evaluating convergent validity. One measure assessed hate (Aumer et al, 2016), and included 27 items assessing multiple aspects of hate including emotions, motivations, and attitudes. This measure was chosen because it reflects an interpersonal orientation to hatred-responding to a wrongdoer-that is similar to the present measure under development.…”