FOR LOVE OR HATE?: The brain appears to activate in some of the same areas when people look at photos of people they love as when they look at pictures of people they hate--but not people they feel neutrally toward. Coincidence?
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If love is said to come from the heart, what about hate? Along with music, religion, irony and a host of other complex concepts, researchers are on the hunt for the neurological underpinnings of hatred. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has begun to reveal how the strong emotion starts to emerge in the brain.
Neurobiologist Semir Zeki, of University College London's Laboratory of Neurobiology, led a study last year that scanned the brains of 17 adults as they gazed at images of a person they professed to hate. Across the board, areas in the medial frontal gyrus, right putamen, premotor cortex and medial insula activated. Parts of this so-called "hate circuit," the researchers noted, are also involved in initiating aggressive behavior, but feelings of aggression itself—as well as anger, danger and fear—show different patterns in the brain than hatred does.
Certainly loathing can spring from positive feelings, such as romantic love (in the guise of a former partner or perceived rival). But love seems to deactivate areas traditionally associated with judgment, whereas hatred activates areas in the frontal cortex that may be involved in evaluating another person and predicting their behavior.
Some commonalities with love, however, are striking, the study authors note. The areas of the putamen and insula that are activated by individual hate are the same as those for romantic love. "This linkage may account for why love and hate are so closely linked to each other in life," they wrote in the October 2008 PLoS ONE.
This initial study, however, does not have everyone convinced that researchers have uncovered the neurological root of hatred. "This is really early in the game," says Scott Huettel, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University who was not involved in the study. Other emotions, such as happiness and sadness, are much better understood, he says: "Even things like regret have some pretty clear neural coordinates."
The next step, Huettel points out, will be to conduct more research on clearly defined aspects and types of hatred—including group hate rather than that aimed at individuals—then test them across several different situations. It will also be important, he notes, to look for cases in which parts of the brain have been impaired and emotional tendencies have changed. "Once you show the positive activation and impairment when the brain region is damaged you have good evidence that you have at least part of the circuit," he says.
What purpose the emotion of hate serves is also still up for conjecture. Although some argue that the feeling has an evolutionary advantage—it might help an individual decide whom to confront or scorn—Huettel notes that, like pinpointing a dedicated neural circuit, it is all just "educated guesses at this point."
Don't you just hate that?
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11 Comments
Add CommentIt seems to me that hatred is fear without courage. In other words, dealing directly with a threat, a cause of fear, will reduce it through the familiarity that comes with addressing a problem as it is pondered and questioned. Once it no longer holds such a strong charge, having managed the problem will instill a sense of mastery. No hatred remains. It is when fear goes immediately to blame and a desire for vindication or revenge that it turns into hatred, because the source of power for correcting the challenge is exterior to the individual, not internal. If I blame you for something, I am not responsible; if I am not responsible, I am powerless to correct the injustice. Hatred is fear and acquired powerlessness in the face of a perceived injustice. The way to stop hate? Take some personal responsibility for your life. On a larger scale, to use the word hatred for a revulsion in response to a social movement (e.g., Nazism) or public figure (e.g., Bin Laden) is probably to misname the emotions of disgust, anger, a desire to protect, a sense of injustice, incomprehension: all of which can be converted either to courageous action in an outer direction, or dissolve into acquired helplessness internally--and who wouldn't hate feeling like that? For example, I suspect most Americans will tell you they hate Bin Laden, which demonstrates the sense of helplessness shared in the population. Politicians and other social engineers: take note when you hear the word "hate" because you are seeing the collective sense of powerlessness in people that can combust into a firestorm of irrationality.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWOW!!...and what part of the brain is responsible for empty intellectualizing?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSparc boy empty intellectualizing what a creative term. Jibberish might be more appropriate in describing the first post.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo hate and romantic love both provide a pair of goggles through which we judge others, is what I'm taking from this. Why does Bin Laden still come up though? I thought people figured out by now that he had nothing to do with 9/11 but it gave us a great excuse to bomb the sh*t out of a country that wouldn't play ball and let us build a pipeline...I don't hate him but I pity those who do.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSeawriter,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat an apt name!!
How suitable for someone who would write about a topic he/she is so obviously 'at sea' about!
May I suggest that looking at science through the lens of a political philosophy will let you see only one thing clearly..... the political philosophy. I hate it when people do that.......
Seawriter's message isn't useless. It's just hard to understand. Basically he is saying this:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPretending that any occurrence can control one's mind is an illusion. Hatred, as every emotion, is a product of the mind. Because my mind is the only thing I can truly control, it is my choice to hate. If I deny this reality and assume that hatred is a natural and healthy response to extreme injustice, the emotion will be attributed to EXTERIOR causes. Because exterior causes are beyond my control, it will also be assumed that changing the emotion--hatred--is beyond my control. This leads to learned helplessness which leads to depression.
By the way, words are only as meaningful as the interpreter desires them to be.
Anger and Joy share the same foundations with a focus on context replacement - either by aggressively removing the existing or the delayed focus on self-replicating and so drowning-out existing context.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis focus on context replacement brings out the ease in which anger can switch to joy, joy to anger, and a spectrum of mixed states inbetween.
JoshRem is a little confused. PRIMARY emotions are species realated, genetic source. With the development of a sense of SELF (over the first two years of life) we see develop, in tandem, SECONDARY emotions that are dependent on that sense of self for their definition. With this development of self comes top-down skills in repression of emotions but we also recognise emotional events that can overpower that sense of self if we have not experienced the emotions before (or more so the intense expression that cannot be repressed and as such bounces around in our heads like a bull in a china shop! - our teenage years cover periods where we experience these intensities)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe areas of the putamen and insula that are activated by individual hate are the same as those for romantic love.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis makes me feel so much better. Now I understand that the reason my ex loved to hate me and why I hated myself for loving her, is all organic. What a relief. And all this time I've been thinking we were a pair of hopeless neurotics.
In my experience 'hatred', anger, etc, are all generated by some fear.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFear of domination, annihilation, embarrassment, loss of esteem, pain, death, etc seem to generate negative feelings toward persons, places and things, and place the responsibility of our experience on the 'other', rather than owning our part in the relationship, and assessing if the 'fear' is logical and rational.
Fire can hurt or kill me should I hate it, fear it or learn to respect it and learn to live with it?
I tend to have hate for things I perceive as a threat, so I guess that is what its evolutionary function is, to gear me up for self-defence. For example, cockroaches are a threat to my health and property. If I were to see them as harmless I wouldn't stomp on them so much.
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