The Distinctive Features of Hate

An article published in Emotion by Martinez, van Prooijen, & Van Lange (2021) begins by asking whether hate is different from other negative emotions, especially in a world in which children are using the language of hate at younger ages. They studied both interpersonal and intergroup hate and contrasted it with dislike, anger, contempt, and disgust. They conducted five studies of over a thousand participants. From their abstract, they “assessed their subjective experiences of each emotion by measuring the associated intensity, duration, arousal, valence, perceived threats, and action tendencies. Across studies, results revealed that participants feel consistently more emotionally aroused, personally threatened, and inclined toward attack-oriented behaviors when experiencing hate as compared with dislike, anger, contempt and disgust toward interpersonal targets. At the intergroup level, results revealed that participants experience hate as more arousing than the three moral emotions, more intense than dislike, anger and contempt, and feel more inclined toward attack-oriented behaviors than when they feel dislike and contempt. Results are in line with a general pattern of increasing differentiation suggesting that hate is conceptually closer to disgust and contempt than to anger and dislike.”

In social histories, we have seen parents complain that their preschoolers say “I hate you” or “I hate my life” and the frequency of hate speech directed toward others has also increased. Most children don’t use the words contempt or disgust(ing) as early as hate though they do use terms for anger (e.g., mad) and dislike (e.g., I don’t like that). This may have implications for how therapists talk with clients about hate.