What is happening to your brain when you hate?

What is happening to your brain when you hate?

The results may astound you - regardless of who is doing the hating, and who is being hated, the neurological and biochemical evidence was similar.  And three main reasons with evolutionary roots may include:

  1. Territorial reasons - to protect the tribe, clan, family;
  2. Jealousy - either with a sibling over the food, love and attention of a parent; or for a mate (or potential mate);
  3. To correct some injustice that has been inflicted onto someone by someone else.

What is interesting is that most of these studies have been confined to humans mainly because it is obvious because they can speak and have 'longer' memories.

This doesn't mean that animals can't hate, and the author states many instances of animals 'hating' some members of their group, or other groups of animals; as well as humans (we all know of the dog in the neighbourhood that 'hates' certain types of people like children or posties, for instance).

And other studies have linked aversion to certain things/objects/animals/people because of a bad experience (does this come into the 'correcting an injustice' category) and it's very easy to 'hate' or have an aversion to a group of people (or another individual, like the boss, for instance) because of some bad experience.

It's all very easy to say don't 'hate' because people will probably hate more - ultimately, my idea for getting people to 'hate' less and committ less violence is to *remove* the reason for their hatred.  However, in reality, this is not always possible, so we must have policies in place to try and correct whatever wrongdoings have occurred, and can only try and adhere to those policies and agreements in place.


cheers
Night Owl

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