IS THERE A PSYCHOLOGY OF HATE WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND BETTER?

IS THERE A PSYCHOLOGY OF HATE WE NEED TO UNDERSTAND BETTER?

BRAIN SCIENTISTS HAVEN’T PINNED DOWN WHY SOME PEOPLE ACT ON THE FEELING

Maria Puente

The Orlando mass murderer was “full of hate,” President Obama says. But lots of Americans are consumed by hate, so what makes one hater unleash violence on hundreds of innocent people in a gay nightclub?

The science of hate is complicated, and there’s not a single definitive answer.

But psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists think American culture is more permeated than ever by hate and hateful expression, and hate-inspired violence is more prevalent.

“We’re seeing more of these kinds of mass attacks than in the past and it’s usually not for just one reason, it’s multi-dimensional,” says Abby Ferber, a professor of sociology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, who studies hate groups and has written about hate crime in America. “Psychological factors might be one factor but there are other cultural and sociological factors.”

“Anger is always there because it’s a human emotion,” says Liza Gold, a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University’s medical school in Washington, D.C. “The issue is acting on it.”

In fact, she says, most people filled with hate do not act on it. “They just quietly stew,” she says. “There is interest in the psychology of people who commit violence but we have not yet identified the brain chemical that makes (science) say, ‘This person has too much of neurochemical A.’ ” We’re talking about this, again, because of the deaths of 49 people enjoying Latino Night at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub early Sunday, who were killed by a man using an assault-style weapon before he died in a shootout with police.

The inevitable debate that followed has devolved into a search for blame, stirring up a poisonous goulash of arguments over partisan politics, mental illness, gun control, Islamic bigotry and terrorism; but at the core of it all? Hate.

“Our culture is much angrier, much more hate-filled than ever before, and our politics this year exemplifies that,” says Ferber. “It’s much more acceptable to express anger and act on it, and with access to the Internet, (haters) can find support and applause for their feelings.”

Hate usually comes from “a deeply insecure place” in the human personality, says Harold Koplewicz, a leading child and adolescent psychiatrist and president of the Child Mind Institute in New York.

Hate, he says, can be a symptom of personality disorder most often found among young men in their 20s, an age when the brain’s prefrontal cortex may not be completely developed. Such young men have higher suicide rates, he says. They tend to take risks rather than assess costs. They may be cut off from their families, unsuccessful at work or in school, and angry about it all.

“There is a certain percentage of young adults who feel alienated, who grab hold of a group of haters and say ‘I am part of that group,’ ” Koplewicz says. “Haters like company — it makes them feel better, it justifies their hate. Haters rarely hate alone; they encourage others to hate along with them, they want peer validation.”

Haters usually are people who feel victimized in some way, says Ferber. They feel their culture, religion or lifestyle is threatened. They feel anxious about their masculinity (most recent mass shootings were committed by males). They feel threatened by visible cultural change, such as growing acceptance of gay people. They feel victimized by economic insecurity.

What’s different now, says Gold, is haters’ ability to connect with others.

“Before social media, people had to work harder to find each other, now they don’t,” Gold says. “It’s much easier to hold a bizarre idea if you see all these other people believe it, too. There is a mob psychology to this: Social media provides the mob.”

Can hate-turned-to-violence be predicted through brain science? Not yet.

Neuroscientists have made progress in understanding more about brain function but there’s still a ways to go in understanding hate and violent anger, says Cameron Craddock, director of imaging for the Center for the Developing Brain at the Child Mind Institute.

“We have not yet figured out what parts or structures of the brain are different in people who have a psychiatric disorder,” says Craddock. In one brain-scan experiment, people were asked to look at pictures of people they hate and pictures of people they don’t hate, to see which areas of the brain were engaged.