I think I sensed this odious scenario coming 2 years ago during the bizarre presidential election, when I wrote an editorial describing the “fear and loathing” that permeated the political process and the unusual behavior of the candidates.1 A year after the election, I commented about the toxic zeitgeist of political extremism from a psychiatric perspective.2 The situation appears to be getting worse, and the folie en masse is intensifying and its hateful cacophony is deafening to our sensibilities.
Aaron Beck, MD, the father of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), wrote a book about hate.3 It may be a fantasy, but I wish the leaders on both sides would agree to a course of CBT to recognize the destructive path of intransigent hyper-partisanship. They might then transcend their egocentric attitudes and inspire millions of their followers to communicate rationally, instead of stoking the fires of resentment and enmity toward the “other side.”
Let’s get back to science: Where are the pathways of hate located in the brain? An interesting study was conducted to detect the neural circuits that mediate hate.4 The researchers obtained functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of participants while they were viewing the face of a person they hate compared with the face of an acquaintance toward whom they have neutral feelings. They also calculated a “hate score” for each participant for the analysis. They found that viewing a hated person increased the activity in several brain regions, including the medial frontal gyrus, right putamen, premotor cortex, frontal pole, and medial insula bilaterally. The activation in 3 areas correlated with the intensity of the hatred: right insula, right premotor cortex, and right frontal-medial gyrus. At the same time, the right superior frontal gyrus showed deactivation. Interestingly, hate and romantic love shared activation in 2 areas: the putamen and insula. This suggests that passionate love and passionate hate are 2 sides of the same neural coin! It prompts me to wonder what happens to the capacity to love among political extremists when their putamen and insula are filled up with hate. It also makes me wonder if unbridled hatred can be “enjoyable” and even addictive, as passionate romantic love is.
The bottom line: Consider the brain changes that are occurring on a large scale in at least a hundred million political partisans, and whether those neural circuits get even more intensely activated following the elections, regardless of the outcome.
Finally, we must remain cognizant of the epigenetic consequences of emotions and stress.5 There is solid scientific evidence that extremes of human experiences can modify gene expression in sperm and fetuses, resulting in a transgenerational effect upon the children of the extreme partisans, and also the children of nonpartisan observers, who experience unmitigated anxiety due to the inescapable cloud of negative affect shrouding their daily lives.6 So politicians should be cognizant that perpetuating a bitter war against each other may be detrimental to their progeny and future generations. I am frankly worried about the epigenetically disrupted emotional stability of voters circa 2035, born in these days of unprecedented and tumultuous hatred by their hyper-partisan parents.
Henry A. Nasrallah, MD
Editor-in-Chief