![]() Sad, but true – while the people that we hate can easily become the people that we love, the things that we love about them often become the things that we can’t stand. If you’re initially drawn to your partner because he/she is “exciting, spontaneous, and outgoing” or “different, unique, and opposite from me,” there’s a much higher risk that your opinion will flip… and that it will eventually kill the relationship. A woman who once found her boyfriend to be ‘funny and fun’ later disliked his ‘constant silliness.’ A man who initially found his partner ‘refreshingly innocent’ later disparaged her ‘lack of maturity.’ Most importantly, some types of qualities tend to be more ‘fatal’ to relationships than others. When people were asked to think about their last break-up, almost 1/3 of ex-partners specifically listed “unattractive features” that were simply negative versions of qualities that they initially loved. Sadly for all of the Valentines out there, that ‘hate’ to ‘love’ switch can flip the other way as well. This makes the switch from ‘hate’ to ‘love’ quite natural. Well if your brain is trained to activate the insula every time you see the face of someone in your life who elicits a strong reaction, what if something minor happens to flip the switch from negative to positive? If something suddenly makes you start to feel positively – like you learn about a few redeeming qualities, or maybe this person buys you a scarf – the network associated with that person still includes the insula, so your feelings will still be drastically intense. So, the insula becomes activated whether you love or hate somebody, and it controls how strongly you feel about things or people, yet it has nothing to do with whether those feelings are good or bad. Just to demonstrate how important this brain region is to emotional intensity, when people with insula damage were asked to rate how strongly they felt about progressively more positive or negative things, they didn’t respond by feeling more and more intense about them like people with ‘normal’ brains did – instead, they stayed fairly neutral the whole time. Whether those emotions are positive or negative mean nothing to that little brain region all its activation means is that when you see a face, you feel VERY STRONGLY ABOUT THAT PERSON. ![]() 1 But importantly, the insula does not have anything to do with what type of emotions you experience… just their intensity. When neuroimaging subjects looked at the faces of people they strongly hated, the insula region in the brain was activated more than it was with neutral faces, which also happens when you look at faces that make you feel - you guessed it - passionate, romantic love. Pop culture is all for the fluidity of love and hate, but what about scientific research? Well, chick flicks may not be far off base. Boy reveals a vulnerability or minor endearing flaw to girl. Girl spends about half of the movie complaining to a best friend (maybe Judy Greer) about how much she hates the boy, but for some reason can’t avoid him entirely (usually because they work together or for competing businesses). Girl is usually neurotic and/or overwhelmingly anxious. Boy and girl desperately hate each other. Sandra Bullock and Meg Ryan have built entire film careers out of replaying different versions of the same story: Boy meets girl. ‘Friends’ fans will remember when Rachel bitterly hated her co-worker Gavin… until he surprised her with a scarf on her birthday and they ended up kissing on her balcony ('There's a thin line between love and hate, and as it turns out, that line is a scarf'). There’s also a never-ending stream of support from pop culture. Plenty of age-old sayings agree: “There’s a thin line between love and hate.” “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” ![]() ![]() So it seems like love and hate are not quite so different after all. They both make our hearts race, our pupils dilate, and our palms sweat. They’ve both sparked wars, poetry, and some of the greatest epics of all time. They both cloud our thinking and judgment. But are love and hate really all that different? Of course Valentine’s Day is supposed to be about love. Hate? On Valentine’s Day? Isn’t V-Day supposed to be about love, Hallmark, and all of those positive, mushy feelings? In honor of Valentine’s Day, I’d like to take a quick look at one of the most fundamental human emotions - hate. ![]()
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