Why hatred needs a psychological definition
We hear the word "hatred" every day — in the media, in political discourse, on social networks, and in clinical settings as well. Yet it is a concept that psychology, as a science, handles with surprising inconsistency. In everyday speech it blurs into anger, disgust, or prejudice, and it is precisely this imprecision that is problematic — for research as well as for clinical practice. If we want to recognize hatred, understand it, and possibly work with it therapeutically, we first need to anchor it conceptually.
This article offers an overview of what psychology knows about hatred: how to define it, how to classify it, what causes it, and what tools can assess it in clinical practice.
A note on terminology: throughout the text we distinguish between the concepts of hatred and hostility. We use hostility as a broader, more readily operationalizable construct — a way of relating to the world and to other people that encompasses cynicism, suspiciousness, and a tendency toward devaluation. Hatred is a more intense, more bounded, and more specific form of this attitude, with a pronounced motivational charge. In diagnostic practice we assess hatred precisely through indicators of hostility, because direct instruments for hatred itself are almost entirely lacking.
What hatred is — and what it is not
In psychology, hatred can be understood as a relatively stable negative attitude with a pronounced affective and motivational component, bound up with devaluation of the target. It differs from situational anger primarily in its durability and its relational "structure": it is not merely a strong negative feeling but an organized way of relating to the world that persists even after the immediate stimulus has subsided.
A useful conceptual framework was offered by Robert Sternberg (2003; see also Sternberg & Sternberg, 2008) in his Duplex Theory of Hate. This is a model — not an empirically verified description of a causal mechanism, but a conceptualization that helps structure clinical thinking and research questions. The theory is "duplex" in that it has two parts: a triangular component and a story-based component. The triangular part, by analogy with his theory of love, describes hatred through three elements: negation of intimacy (distancing oneself, refusing any closeness), passion (intense anger or fear in relation to the object), and commitment (cognitive devaluation of the object as fundamentally bad or dangerous). Different combinations of these three elements produce different types of hatred — from cold contempt, through furious loathing, to ideologically grounded eliminationist hatred. The story-based part adds that hatred is also organized by narratives about the hated object — stories that cast the other as, for example, an enemy, a contaminant, or a subhuman threat — which supply the cognitive scaffolding that sustains and justifies the emotion. The empirical evidence for this model comes predominantly from research on attitudes and extremism; it has not been systematically validated in individual clinical diagnosis.
For the definition to be clinically useful, hatred must be distinguished from related but distinct constructs. Anger is a state emotion — temporally bounded, situationally triggered, and functionally adaptive (it signals a violation of norms or boundaries); hatred, by contrast, is enduring and does not subside once a conflict is resolved. Disgust is a visceral reaction primarily to contamination or moral transgression, less cognitively mediated and not requiring active devaluation of the object. Contempt shares a hierarchical element with hatred — the object is perceived as inferior — but it lacks the motivational urgency and intensity. Prejudice is a cognitive and attitudinal component without a necessarily strong affective charge; hatred may be its emotional consequence, but the two are not identical.
How to classify hatred
By object
Interpersonal hatred attaches to a specific individual — typically in the context of betrayal, prolonged conflict, or serious relational injury. Group (ideological) hatred targets a category of people on the basis of their group membership. This distinction matters because the psychological mechanisms and the therapeutic implications both differ. Group hatred is addressed in greater detail in the second part of this series.
By temporal character
Reactive or episodic hatred arises as a response to a concrete and real injury. It is intense but temporally bounded and, clinically, generally less severe. Chronic or trait hatred is a stable way of relating to particular objects or to the world in general. It is this form that is clinically most relevant — it may be part of a personality pathology or persist as a lasting consequence of trauma.
The key diagnostic question, then, is not merely whether the client experiences hatred, but whether it is a transient reaction to a real injury or a stable feature of their functioning.
Psychological mechanisms and causes
Frustration, the persistence of anger, and cognitive mediation
The classic frustration–aggression hypothesis (Dollard et al., 1939) holds that the blocking of goal-directed behavior elicits aggressive tendencies. Hatred, in this context, can be understood as a product of chronic, unresolved frustration: it arises in situations where anger cannot be expressed adaptively and instead solidifies into a lasting negative attitude.
Dollard's model was substantially elaborated by Leonard Berkowitz (1989), whose cognitive-neoassociationist model emphasizes that frustration primarily produces negative affect — and only the cognitive appraisal of the situation and the presence of relevant cues in the environment determine whether this affect develops into anger, hatred, or some other form of hostility. This addition matters for clinical work: the same frustrating experience may lead to different emotional outcomes in different clients, depending on their cognitive schemas and the current context.
Social identity and the need for group cohesion
Tajfel and Turner's social identity theory (1979) explains group hatred as a mechanism for maintaining positive self-esteem through derogation of the outgroup. Put simply: members of a group bolster their own positive self-image by actively devaluing an outgroup, to which they ascribe dangerous or inferior qualities. Hatred thus serves a function — it strengthens the cohesion of the ingroup and provides a simple narrative about the world. This explains why group hatred is so resistant to rational correction.
The attachment perspective and narcissistic injury
A less common but clinically very fruitful angle is offered by attachment theory (Bowlby, 1982). Here hatred — especially the interpersonal kind — is understood as a transformed bond: strong emotional ties can, after betrayal, abandonment, or serious disappointment, turn into their negative mirror image. "I hate you precisely because I loved you." This dynamic is clearly visible in the context of breakups, family estrangement, or therapeutic ruptures.
Alongside the attachment perspective, the conception of hatred as a defense against narcissistic injury is essential for clinical practice. Kohut (1972) described what he called narcissistic rage — a furious, disproportionate, and barely controllable reaction to a sense of humiliation or to a threat to one's own grandiosity. Kernberg (1992), in the context of the pathology of love and hatred, then worked out how, in individuals with narcissistic or borderline personality organization, hatred may serve as a defense against massive shame: I would rather hate than admit my own failure or helplessness. Clinically, this dynamic manifests as an intense, unstable, and explosive form of hatred, coming and going depending on the current threat to the sense of self.
How to measure hatred
Direct self-report instruments and their limits
The simplest approach — asking directly — runs into the fundamental problem of social desirability. Hatred is a socially unacceptable emotion, and respondents systematically underreport or rationalize it. A few self-report measures do exist in the Sternberg tradition: the Triangular Hate Scale (Sternberg & Sternberg, 2008), validated in U.S. and German samples, and the more recent, briefer HatERS (Toussaint et al., 2020), for which only preliminary evidence is available. These instruments are used in research on hate rather than as routine clinical diagnostic tools, and they have not been standardized for individual clinical use.
A crucial message for practitioners is that there is currently no widely accepted, clinically standardized instrument designed to assess hatred directly as a diagnostic construct — that is, one with adequate reliability, construct validity, and normative data. This gap in itself says something about the state of the field and explains why, in practice, we reach for indirect indicators.
Implicit instruments
The Implicit Association Test (IAT) and its variants circumvent the desirability problem by measuring the speed of associations at a level to which the respondent has no conscious access. The IAT is useful for research on implicit associations, but its interpretation at the level of the individual is limited; in clinical diagnosis it is therefore used, at most, as a supplement, if at all (Greenwald et al., 2009).
Performance and projective methods
In clinical practice, hatred is usually treated as a component of a broader personality profile — hostility, cynicism, paranoid traits, rigidity, a tendency toward devaluation — and we therefore assess it indirectly through methods focused on personality functioning. The instruments described below are indirect indicators of hostility and aggression; they differ in their degree of standardization, psychometric support, and acceptability across diagnostic schools. They must always be interpreted in the context of the overall clinical picture.
The Rorschach test (ROR) — Exner's Comprehensive System (CS) captures aggressive movement (AG) and morbid content (MOR); the newer R-PAS system (Meyer et al., 2011) then distinguishes aggressive content (AGC) and aggressive movement (AGM). Both systems also include space responses (S in the CS; SR and SI in R-PAS), which have traditionally been interpreted in relation to oppositionality or negativistic tendencies, although their meaning should be handled cautiously and in context. Hatred itself is not scored directly, but the profile of hostile and aggressive percepts gives a clinically valuable picture of how the individual internally structures the interpersonal world.
The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) — narrative analysis of themes of hostility, revenge, and devaluation of characters in the stories makes it possible to identify how the client constructs interpersonal scenarios. The advantage is the natural projection of complex relational schemas; the drawback is the lower standardization of scoring and the dependence on the rater's experience.
The Hand Test (Wagner's Hand Test) — of all the instruments named, the Hand Test comes closest to a direct operationalization of hostile potential. Wagner's scoring directly includes the categories AGG (aggression) and TEN (tension). A key derived index is the Acting Out Score (AOS = DIR + AGG − AFF − COM − DEP), which sets aggressive and directive tendencies against cooperative and affiliative ones and is used to anticipate overt acting-out behavior. The Hand Test may therefore be particularly relevant in forensic or risk-assessment contexts.
The Rosenzweig Picture-Frustration Test (PFT) — aims directly at frustration–aggression responses and distinguishes the direction of aggression (extraggression, intraggression, imaggression) as well as the type of response (obstacle-dominance, ego-defense, need-persistence). The PFT connects naturally with the frustration model described in the previous section. It should be noted that the psychometric support for the PFT is more uneven than for contemporary standardized inventories; its results should therefore be interpreted cautiously and in the context of other data sources.
MMPI-2 and MMPI-2-RF — in the MMPI-2, the most relevant scales for a hostile profile include ANG (anger), CYN (cynicism), ASP (antisocial practices), TPA (Type A behavior), and the Cook-Medley Hostility scale (Ho). In the MMPI-2-RF, related constructs are more appropriately represented through RC3 (Cynicism), RC4 (Antisocial Behavior), RC6 (Ideas of Persecution), ANP (Anger Proneness), AGG (Aggression), and AGGR-r (Aggressiveness-Revised). The Cook-Medley Ho scale holds a special place, with its own research tradition concerning chronic hostility and cardiovascular risk; modern research, however, suggests that Ho indexes cynicism and bitterness rather than direct aggressiveness or hatred in the narrow sense — something that must be taken into account in interpretation (Smith, 1994). In the context of hatred as a trait, these inventories are strongest in capturing the broader personality profile within which hatred makes sense.
Clinical diagnosis as context
In practice we most often assess hatred not as an isolated construct but as part of a broader personality profile. As a stable feature of functioning it manifests most clearly in three clinical pictures: in paranoid personality disorder it takes the form of persistent grudge-bearing and suspiciousness; in antisocial personality disorder it is bound up with cognitive devaluation of others and an absence of empathy; in borderline personality disorder it manifests through characteristic splitting — abrupt shifts from idealization to hatred and back, reflecting the instability of object representations. It is this third clinical picture that tends to be most common in practice and is closely linked to the dynamics of narcissistic injury described earlier.
What this means for practice
Hatred is a psychologically relevant construct that deserves more precise naming in diagnostic thinking. It is not merely strong anger, it is not merely prejudice — it is a specific, enduring, and motivationally charged form of relation to an object that can significantly affect a client's functioning and the course of therapy. Clinically, it most often appears as a component of a broader personality profile: through paranoid traits, cynicism, a tendency toward devaluation, or dramatic oscillations between idealization and rejection.
At the same time, we must be honest about the state of the measurement instruments: clinically standardized instruments aimed directly at hatred as a construct are lacking. In practice, we therefore assess it indirectly — through instruments such as the Rorschach (CS or R-PAS), the TAT, the Hand Test, the Rosenzweig PFT, or the MMPI-2, which together assemble a mosaic of how hostility operates within the client's psyche. Each of these instruments offers a different angle and has different psychometric backing — their combination and their embedding in the clinical context remain decisive.
This gap in the research and diagnostic field is not merely an academic footnote. It is a challenge — for researchers, but also for clinicians who encounter hatred in their everyday work and need a conceptual language in which to speak about it precisely and productively.
References
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Bowlby, J. (1982). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment (2nd ed.). Basic Books.
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Dollard, J., Doob, L. W., Miller, N. E., Mowrer, O. H., & Sears, R. R. (1939). Frustration and aggression. Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.1037/10022-000
Exner, J. E. (2003). The Rorschach: A comprehensive system (4th ed.). Wiley.
Greenwald, A. G., Poehlman, T. A., Uhlmann, E. L., & Banaji, M. R. (2009). Understanding and using the Implicit Association Test: III. Meta-analysis of predictive validity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 97(1), 17–41. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015575
Kernberg, O. F. (1992). Aggression in personality disorders and perversions. Yale University Press.
Kohut, H. (1972). Thoughts on narcissism and narcissistic rage. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 27(1), 360–400. https://doi.org/10.1080/00797308.1972.11822721
Meyer, G. J., Viglione, D. J., Mihura, J. L., Erard, R. E., & Erdberg, P. (2011). Rorschach Performance Assessment System: Administration, coding, interpretation, and technical manual. Rorschach Performance Assessment System.
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Sternberg, R. J. (2003). A duplex theory of hate: Development and application to terrorism, massacres, and genocide. Review of General Psychology, 7(3), 299–328. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.7.3.299
Sternberg, R. J., & Sternberg, K. (Eds.). (2008). The nature of hate. Cambridge University Press.
Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.
Toussaint, L. L., Barry, M., Enomoto, M., Anians, W., Rodamaker, K., Keil, A., & Meier, M. (2020). Hateful Emotional Responses Scale (HatERS): Development and initial evaluation. Journal of Hate Studies, 16(1), 49–62. https://doi.org/10.33972/jhs.155
Wagner, E. E. (1983). The Hand Test manual (Rev. ed.). Western Psychological Services.
This article is part of a series devoted to the psychology of hatred. The second part deals with group hatred, extremism, and the forensic perspective.
The content of this blog is educational in nature and does not serve as a substitute for professional psychological or psychiatric care.
