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6 minutes
Most of us have said “I hate you” at some point in our lives. But do we really understand what this feeling implies? Let’s see it in detail.
Often, many people misunderstand the concept of hate and they resort to this word casually and erroneously in everyday life. For example, when someone says: “I hate my teacher for not passing my exam” or “I hate my ex because he was unfaithful to me”they are not really saying it seriously.
Hate is a feeling that goes much further. In fact, contrary to what many say, it is not the opposite of love; what is opposed to love is indifference. And having this distinction clear is vital to understand this complex feeling. That said, let’s see what it is, what its causes are and how we can combat it.
What is hate?
Hate is a relatively stable feeling that denotes intense dislike for another person, entity, or group. It usually includes negative emotions such as anger, disgust or contempt; however, they should not be confused with the latter, which are situational and of short duration.
In this case, it is a more complex emotion than those that are experienced reactively in certain situations. In addition to being more durable, it implies a rational evaluation of the hated object and a motivation to eliminate it.
Hence the fact that hate crimes always involve negative prejudices towards the other and be coldly calculated.
Differences between hate, anger, contempt and envy
Hatred differs from anger in that the former involves the entire individual or group, while the latter only considers one aspect of them. That is, when we hate, we repudiate the other for what he is. Instead, when we get angry, we do it because that other did something that hurt us.
Thus, we experience anger when the other’s actions harm us and we want an apology, a change in behavior, and so on.
But when there is hate, we just want the other to go away. There are no excuses that are worth, nor changes that work, because everything that causes us aversion is related to its own existence.
However, contempt would be the mild version of hate, since the other is also rejected for what he is. However, in this case we can be indifferent to that other; but not with hate, since we are committed to getting rid of them, be it socially, mentally or physically.
Lastly, the envious person differs from the hater in that the former does not wish the other evil directly; he only longs to have those other people’s goods that he lacks. On the other hand, when he hates himself, he does not want to have anything that the other has, since everything that is related to the latter is worthy of rejection.
Despite this, let us not forget that continued anger, contempt, and envy can turn into feelings of hate.
physiology of hate
Unlike anger, there is no physiological pattern that is characteristic of hate, since the latter involves a long-term experience. Despite this, neuroscientists have identified a pattern in functional magnetic resonance imaging and have named it the “hate circuit».
This involves the activation of the middle frontal gyrus, the right putamen circuit, the premotor cortex and the insula, many of them also linked to aggressive behavior. In any case, the mechanisms of rage, danger and fear follow different patterns than hate.
For his part, the cognitive neuroscientist Emile Bruneau found that areas of the brain involved in the judgment and evaluation of other people are usually activated in hate.
Why do people hate?
Feelings of hate often develop for a variety of reasons. The most common are the following:
- Feeling envy or wanting what another person has. Which leads them to believe that it is unfair for someone to have what they do not have.
- By learning. In this case, parents, culture or other social groups instill that feeling through prejudices or unfounded beliefs about a group of people. For example, racism, xenophobia, and homophobia are typical cases of learned hate.
- Being humiliated or mistreated by other people. In these cases, the impotence generated by not being able to defend oneself tends to gradually cultivate feelings of hatred.
- The dehumanization. Believing that other people are inferior, uncivilized, or just animals.
How to fight it?
According to Emile Bruneau, it is important to discover the misunderstanding behind the conflict that makes people hate each other. This because in In all manifestations of hate, there are usually incorrect preconceived ideas about the otherwhich deal with their way of being, their preferences, their thoughts, etc.
Therefore, for the neuroscientist, the best way to deal with and overcome hate is not to make the two parties like each other, since this has never worked. Instead, recognize those misconceptions, reveal them, and understand that their animosity was always based on ill-founded prejudice.
In fact, this way of overcoming hate was verified by Bruneau himself in a experiment carried out after the terrorist attacks by the Islamic State in Paris, during 2015. In said study, Bruneau wanted to analyze the hatred towards Muslims developed by Americans.
To do this, he reproduced a video of a Muslim woman where she states that blaming all Muslims for the terrorist actions of the Islamic State, was like blaming all white Americans for the actions of the Ku Klux Klan.
This affirmation was able to change the vision that many of the analyzed groups had about Muslims. In this case, exposing them to the inconsistencies behind their hate worked.
The importance of knowing how to identify emotions
As we said at the beginning, there is a lot of confusion about hate and what it really means. If people realize that this feeling is something much bigger and more harmful, they may change the way they use the word.
Thus, it is necessary to discern between feelings, an essential component of emotional intelligence. If indeed we were to experience it, it is pertinent to question those beliefs that make us hate, and reformulate them. Even, professional assistance may be required. Remember that hate never leaves anything good behind.
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