Journal of Relationships Research, Volume 7, e2, 1–9 c  The Author(s) 2016. doi 10.1017/jrr.2016.2 Can’t Let It Go: Hate in Interpersonal Relationships Katherine Aumer, 1 Anne Cathrine Krebs Bahn, 1 Cortney Janicki, 1 Nicolas Guzman, 1 Natalie Pierson, 1 Susanne Estelle Strand 2 and Helene Totlund 2 1 Hawaii Pacific University, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA 2 Høgskolen i Lillehammer, Lillehammer, Norway Theories concerning hatred in personal relationships lack empirical evidence. These two studies address the need to provide empirical information about how hate works in interpersonal, loving relationships. Effort justification theory (Aronson & Mills, 1959) suggests that past hate may have a beneficial function in relationships that remain together; however, if hate is a truly destructive motivation (Rempel & Burris, 2005), this hate may have a lasting irreconcilable impact on the quality of the relationship. By surveying people in both the United States and Norway about their personal loving relationships, we discovered that hatred leaves a lasting deleterious impression on interpersonal relationships. People are more likely to report less intimacy, satisfaction, and love with people they have previously hated. Furthermore, effort justification and cognitive dissonance, when measured as relationship length, was observed in the report of higher commitment to those previously hated. Future assessments of relationship quality should consider measuring hatred and length of relationship. ■ Keywords: hate, relationship quality, intimacy, satisfaction Most of the research addressing emotions in intimate and interpersonal relationships focuses on love (e.g., Hatfield & Rapson, 1993) and anger (e.g., Dutton, 2010). However, relationships can have hurtful and dam- aging qualities that can elicit hate. Surprisingly, there is a lack of research addressing hatred in interpersonal rela- tionships. Much research has been spent on understand- ing group hatred, specifically hatred towards minorities or other group members (Brewer, 1999; McCann, 2009; Ray & Van Bavel, 2014). And although this research is laudable, the interpersonal dimension of hatred that deals with one’s hatred towards another person (despite his/her group membership) has not been fully investi- gated. There are theoretical approaches to better under- standing interpersonal hatred (e.g., Rempel & Burris, 2005; Sternberg, 2003; Sternberg & Sternberg, 2008); however, little empirical research has fully vetted these theories. Historically, much of the research on hatred in psychology comes from a psychoanalytic perspective (Blum, 1997; Kernberg, 1992; Klein, 1975; McKellar, 1950; Moss, 2003; Strasser, 1999; Vitz & Mango, 1997), which focuses more on the theoretical nature of hatred and less on the empirical evidence. The primary purpose of the following studies was to better understand, from an empirical perspective, how interpersonal hatred can affect the quality of the relation- ship with someone hated. Much of the current literature concerning interpersonal relationships does not consider how ambivalent feelings (like having both hate and love in a relationship) can have an impact on a relationship’s satisfaction. Some research does attempt to investigate how hate operates or is defined in a relationship. Fitness and Fletcher (1993) conducted several studies on hate in intimate relationships and concluded that the overall con- cept of hate in intimate relationships involves low levels of control of the situation, with a high level of obsta- cles and significant unpleasantness. They concluded that hate may be one of the more difficult emotions to define as it is so closely categorised with instances of anger. Similarly, Shiota, Campos, Gonzaga, Keltner, and Peng (2010) found that contempt and other negative emotions ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE: Katherine Aumer, Hawaii Pacific University, 1166 Fort St Mall Suite 309, Honolulu, HI 96813, United States. Email: kaumer@gmail.com 1 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/jrr.2016.2 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.161.69.107, on 09 Jun 2020 at 23:23:21, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at