Trying to Map Love and Hate in the Brain

Getting to the Bottom of Hatred

"People have done lots of studies that have involved using lots of different facial emotions: faces from in-groups, faces from out-groups, faces of smiling people, faces of different races," Carter said. "But people were inferring a certain emotion from those faces."

With this study, Carter noted, the scientists flat out asked the people how they felt about these faces and then ran the scans. In this case, the assumption wasn't an emotion, but what was happening in the functional MRI scan.

Zeki wants to use this new approach to do more studies.

"We've got many other follow-up studies to do, and even this is a follow-up study to the love study," Zeki said. "For example, romantic love is usually directed at one person at any given time, but with hate it can be directed at a group or an individual member of the group."

To Zeki, that makes hatred more complicated than love.