Chapter 14: Love and Hate Flashcards
What are some ethnological explanations for why people hate?
- Ethnologists characterize aggression as the product of adaptive evolutionary processes. Consistent with evolutionary theory, mass murderers are usually men of prime mating age, demonstrating their frustration at not having successful relationships.
- Individuals may also experience buildups of aggressive behaviour because our society says to repress them, causing an eventual explosion.
- Someone like Hitler may have also been demonstrating an inappropriate expression of territorial aggression.
What are the problems with a purely biological approach to explaining aggression?
This theoretical orientation helps us understand why people have a deep-rooted capacity for aggression, but doesn’t explain why there are so many individual and cross-cultural differences in aggressiveness. Ethological explanations also tend to imply an inevitability about aggression, which is simply untrue and a dangerous fatalism.
How do brain structures and hormones influence aggression?
- People who have fits of rage or intense hatred have been found to have abnormalities of brain structures involving lesions on and near the hypothalamus and amygdala.
- Disorders of serotonin and dopamine also present in individuals with excess impulsitivity and aggression.
- Psychopathic behaviour and drug and/or alcohol abuse are also often correlated.
How do gene-environment interactions influence hateful behaviours?
- Problematic parenting is associated with hateful behaviour in children.
- However, twin and adoption sudies have revealed that both genetic and environmental factors contribute to aggressive, antisocial behaviour.
- Children born with difficul temperaments can also elicit negative behaviours from their frustrated parents.
How does Freudian psychoanalytic theory explain hatred?
- Freud proposed that all individuals have a death instinct: Thanatos is the drive toward death and self-destructive behaviour. This energy must either by released or dealt with in another, more socially appropriate manner.
- Some people projected this death impulse onto other hated objects. One might see others as aggressive, hateful, and dangerous, which results in hatred and paranoia toward the object of the projection.
- If an individual feels hatred towards a dangerous, unsuitable object, he might displace that hostility to a more suitable and elss threatening object (e.g. a disadvantaged social group).
How did each of the neo-analytic theorists explain hateful personalities?
- Jung hypothesized that the shadow is where the primitive animal insticts reside. Inappropriate or uncontrolled expression of one’s shadow could result in the type of primal hatred and aggression evidenced by Hitler.
- Alder focused on early social experiences, especially coping with rejection. Children who are rejected by their parents may come to view the world as hostile, and are more likely to grow up to be criminals. Most people learn to compensate for these inferior feelings by succeeding at things. However, individuals who develop an inferiority complex may sometimes overcompensate (developing a superiority complex), which leads them to attack others in an attempt to increase their own feelings of importance.
- Erikson outlined three unsuccessfully resolved psychosocial stages that may result in an angry individual: (1) Children who don’t develop adequate trust during infancy will be distrustful later in life; (2) children who are treated in a hostile manner when pursuing autonomy may become angry; (3) if the child’s initiative is punished and thwarted rather than realistically channeled, the child may fail to develop an adequate superego.
Why are people with an authoritarian personality type more likely to be cruel?
Fromm theorized that individuals feel more and more isolated as civilization advances and as people attain more and more individual freedom. In order to combact these feelings of loneliness, some people renounce their freedom, and individuality and principles, in order to belong to the group, at any cost. This results in pushing negative attributes and stereotypes onto other groups so that the authoritarian personality can feel good. Fromm notes that authoritarian personality is often the result of a negative relationship with one’s parents.
Outline the humanistic approach to hostile personalities.
- Humanistic psychologists underscore the importance of morality, justice, and commitment. They focus more on the mature self-actualizer than the inordinately hateful individual.
- Rogers believed that negative emotions stem from a lack of positive regard in the individual’s life, particularly from parents during childhood. He emphasized the need for unconditional positive regard, especially from one’s mother. Conditional positive regard leads to children becoming anxious, and as their self-concept grows more and more incongruous they distort reality and may become psychotic.
- Maslow insisted that hatred isn’t a part of people’s personalities, but rather a result of experiencing a deficient environment. He argued that people need structure and regulation as well as love and feelings of safety.
How do trait theorists view aggression?
- For trait theorists, aggression is a part of the dynamic organization of personality. Cattell used factor analysis to isolate source traits that seem to characterize someone as a killer.
- Eysenck related hate to psychoticism. A person high on this dimension is impulsive, cruel, though-minded, and antisocial. These differences are assumed to be based on differences in neurophysiology.
- Seymour Feshbach viewed anger as an emotional reaction that culminates in hateful behaviour. Children who are more empathetic are less aggressive.
How do cognitive approaches depict hatred?
- Cognitive psychologists pay little attention to biology and childhood. They emphasize the individual’s interpretations of their relationships and experiences in determining their actions. That is, hatred and aggression depend onthe ways we learn to explain the world.
- George Kelley examined cognitive simplicity, which describes how individuals are less likely to see differences among people, and more likely to dismis whole groups as enemies. Hostile people also attempt to fit others into their previous construals instead of changing their interpretations of reality.
What do learning theories say about hateful emotions?
- Classic learning theory says that hateful emotions are conditioned responses, whereas operant learning theory emphasizes the role of reinforcements and punishments in shaping learned aggressiveness. Social learning theory incorporates the point that hateful behaviour of others is modeled, observed, imitated, and vicariously reinforced.
- Studies of mass murderers indicate that many of them indeed did suffer at the hands of individuals similar to their victims.
- Dollard and Miller’s theory speculates that hatred can be a learned second drive that motivates an individual’s behaviours.
- Children who lived in abusive households vicariously pick up the idea that aggression is appropriate. These people are more likely to become abusive parents themselves.
What are some examples of the cultural differences in hatred?
- There’s a higher rate of homocide in the Southern US, which seems to be due to a culture of honor that advocates violent responses to perceived insults.
- There’s little regional difference in the North-South homicide rates for African Americans, suggesting that it’s something about White southern culture that causes the violence.
- Wide-spread presence of guns contributes to a cycle of violence in which arguments lead to deadly retribution.
How can we try to reduce hate in our societies?
Tendencies toward hatred and aggression can be minimized by serious efforts to create a society with physically healthy individuals (who also avoid substance abuse) who develop good relations with their parents; a society that models and rewards only cooperative behaviour; a society that fosters justice and guides its citizens along a disciplined and productive life path. However, even in such a stable, well-balanced society, certain individuals will still need more intensive interventions.
What are the psychoanalytic explanations for love?
- Freud viewed love as arising from sexual instincts. During the oral stage of development, mothers provide one’s first erotic pleasure—oral gratification. Mothers become the child’s first object of love.
- During the genital stage, the individual learns that sexual satisfaction can be provided by a sexual partner. The strong feeling accompanying this attraction is what Freud calls love.
- This is a rather pessimistic view. Further, biological evidence shows that the motivation for sex and romantic love involve different neurological systems.
- On the other hand, there’s neurological evidence which shows that love and lust reciprocally motivate each other, as Freud surmised.
- Melanie Klein and the object relations theorists noted that the motherly relationship becomes the template for future relationships, whether as a mirror or a repulsion.
What are some neo-analytic explanations for love?
- Erikson said that only those who had found their identity will be able to experience true intimacy (and love) whereas those whose ego identity isn’t complete will either remain isolated or engage in false relationships by being promiscuous.
- A modern approach by Phillip Shaver uses models of attachment: the nature of one’s childhood attachment relationship is reflected to some extent in later romantic relationships. There are three romantic attachment styles:
- (1) Secure lovers easily form close relationships with others and let others become close to them; (2) avoidant lovers feel uncomfortable when they’re close to another or when others are close to them, and have trust issues; (3) anxious-ambivalent lovers want to get close but are insecure with the relationship and may scare away partners by being desperate about the relationship.
