Can love and empathy make one aggressive?

Feelings of warmth, tenderness and sympathy can predict aggressive behaviours, a study said.

Two neurohormones — oxytocin and vasopressin — appear to be among the mechanisms contributing to the counter-intuitive response, said researchers from University at Buffalo.

Michael J Poulin, associate professor of psychology, and colleagues conducted a two-part study consisting of a survey and an experiment. “The results of both indicate that the feelings we broadly call compassion can predict aggression on behalf of those in need,” said Poulin.

They asked people to report on someone close to them and

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explain how that person was threatened by a third-party. Then, participants described their emotions and reactions.

In the study, participants provided a saliva sample to measure neurohormone levels, then heard a compassionevoking story about a fictional participant supposedly in another room with a second fictional participant.

The actual participants were informed that the pair in the other room, strangers to each other, who were to take a math test, would be exposed to a painful but harmless stimulus to measure the effects of physical pain on performance. During the test, the real subject had a choice on how much of a painful stimulus they would provide to the third party competing with the one they had compassion toward.

“The results of both the survey and experiment indicate that the feelings we have when other people are in need, what we broadly call empathic concern or compassion, can predict aggression on behalf of those in need,” said Poulin.

“In situations where we care about someone very much, we were motivated to benefit them, but if there is someone else in the way, we may do things to harm that party,” he said. The reaction is not because the third party has done anything wrong. The study was published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.