A Critical Perspective on Researching Hate with Neuroscientific Methodology

Abstract

Hate is an intense negative emotional state that has had significant political, historical, and social consequences across many societies yet has not received significant investigation from a neuroscientific perspective. Very few studies have approached ‘hate’ directly. The central research question of this thesis is if, and if so, how societally relevant phenomena like ‘hate’ can be studied meaningfully and ethically with empirical, neuroscientific methodology. A literature review was conducted to assess the state of research: theoretical frameworks on complex emotions with related neuroscientific conceptualisations and methodology and ethical considerations were reviewed on the one hand, and definitions of hate, theories and taxonomies of hate with moral and ethical considerations on the other. The literature review revealed the need to explore epistemic consideration more thoroughly, which was subsequently done, drawing on insights from history, sociology and meta science, and outlining the need for theory building and a critical neuroscience approach, where implicit, often paradigmatic assumptions are reflected upon and made explicit. Aiming for a higher ecological validity and an integration of some of the epistemic findings, we developed an extensive dataset of 112 contextualised, emotional narratives with many including hate, discrimination, fear or other related, negative emotionality. All narratives were spoken in by actors (yielding a rich resource designed to be reused by other researchers) and an accompanying task and paradigm were designed to test if the narratives evoke emotion recognition, and secondarily also if the narratives elicit emotions. Importantly, in an extended methodology chapter, learnings and discontinuities are shared, not just the outcome. We testing the developed paradigm with N=66 participants and a subset of 40 narratives (12 positive, 28 negative), and found that the developed narratives: I) successfully elicited a wide range of emotions and showed a co-occurrence in elicited, negative emotions such as hate and anger, for many of the narratives. II) looking at the dynamic rating, the inter-individual and inter-narrative variability is generally high, but there also are narratives which prompted higher vs lower similarity of participant responses across the time-course of a given narrative and emotions (analysed via intersubject correlations). III) free text input of participants showed interesting patterns of what people focus on when expressing what an emotion means for them, and revealed that many participants misunderstood ‘contempt’ specifically, which was taken into account in the other analyses. Relevant insights and recommendations for future studies into complex emotions using narratives stimuli, potentially also with functional MRI, are discussed. Closely related to how we view ourselves and others as part of the social world we inhabit, research on the neuronal processes related to hate are likely to have societally relevant implications. Given that historically, the research programme and its’ methodology is associated with empiricism or reductionism, neuroscientific studies are more likely to adopt a perspective that views hate to be within a person (or even their neurophysiology), an individualisation could obstruct the important consideration of the effects of structural injustices and resulting accountabilities (on personal and societal level). The operationalisation of ‘hate’ in empirical research, therefore, can easily be harmful. Besides the database and paradigm development, the unique contribution of the present dissertation is the synthesis of theoretical accounts across disciplines on the concept of hate and a critical interrogation of paradigmatic assumptions of the neuroscientific discipline specifically. outlining recommendations for future research projects within and beyond academia.