New research published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin provides evidence that holding a grudge is driven by a specific emotional cocktail of both hurt feelings and anger. The findings suggest that when these two emotions combine, victims tend to view the person who wronged them as fundamentally immoral, which encourages a lasting grudge. This psychological shift acts as a form of self-protection, helping people guard against future harm by maintaining vigilance against those who have betrayed them.
Developing close social bonds is a basic human need that is essential for survival, but relationships are inevitably threatened when one person harms another. When someone is wronged, they can respond by seeking revenge or offering forgiveness. Revenge aims to impose costs on the wrongdoer, which might deter future harm, but retaliation tends to escalate conflict and damage relationships beyond repair.
Forgiveness acts as a friendly response to preserve the relationship, but it carries a significant downside. It can leave a person vulnerable to being repeatedly harmed without the wrongdoer facing any actual consequences. Holding a grudge offers an alternative response that serves as a protective psychological shield.
A grudge is defined as a persistent negative feeling that diminishes over time but is easily reactivated when a person is reminded of the offense. By maintaining a level of vigilance against someone who has betrayed them, a victim successfully guards against ongoing threats. Past studies typically examined how emotions like anger and hurt operate independently after a conflict.
Anger usually signals a sense of injustice, an imbalance of power, and a desire to confront the offender. Hurt feelings reflect a sense of vulnerability, emotional dependence, and a damaged social bond. Hurt is often associated with a sense of social pain and devaluation, which highlights how much a person values a specific relationship.
But scientists suspected that looking at these feelings in isolation missed the complete psychological picture. “We saw important gaps in the literature. One gap was the lack of conceptual and theoretical work on grudge holding,” explained study author Jingyuan Sophie Li, a PhD candidate at York University in Canada.
“Recently, van Monsjou and colleagues interviewed about 20 people who were holding grudges and they developed a conceptual definition of grudge holding as sustained feelings of hurt and anger that dissipate over time but can be activated when needed. However, this definition had not been quantitatively tested. We didn’t yet know whether hurt and anger both contribute to grudge holding, or how they might work together.
“Another gap in the literature was the lack of empirical evidence on the factors that contribute to grudge holding. To address these gaps, we began by testing the role of victims’ hurt feelings and anger in the development of grudges. We didn’t yet know whether, how, or why hurt and anger contribute to grudge holding. Previous research shows that hurt and anger are distinct emotions with different social consequences: hurt can sometimes motivate relationship repair, whereas anger can damage relationships.”
“However, researchers still did not understand the interactive effect of hurt and anger,” Li explained. “We therefore asked what happens when someone feels both hurt and anger at the same time. We hypothesized that the interaction of these two emotions would be especially likely to lead to grudge holding. In addition, we began to test hypotheses about why hurt feelings and anger interact to affect grudge holding.”
The researchers designed four studies to explore how the combination of hurt and anger influences the likelihood of holding a long-term grudge. They also wanted to explore if this emotional combination alters a victim’s moral judgment of the person who harmed them. In the first study, the researchers recruited 242 adults from the community who were currently in a romantic relationship.
The participants were asked to write about a recent unresolved conflict with their romantic partner. They then rated their levels of hurt and anger on a numerical scale from one to seven. Participants also completed a survey measuring how strongly they held a grudge, which included assessing feelings of disdain and expectations that the harm would not be easily resolved.
The scientists found that feelings of hurt and anger interacted to predict grudge holding. Participants who experienced high levels of both hurt and anger reported significantly stronger grudges than those who felt only one of these emotions strongly. Neither emotion independently caused a strong grudge without the presence of the other.
To ensure these findings were reliable, the researchers conducted a second study with a larger sample of 694 adults in romantic relationships. The setup mirrored the first study, asking participants to recall a conflict and rate their emotional responses. The results replicated the initial study, providing evidence that the combination of high hurt and high anger is uniquely associated with holding a grudge.
The third study expanded the scope to include a broader range of social connections, not just romantic partners. The researchers recruited 463 undergraduate students and asked them to recall a recent unresolved offense committed by anyone in their life. This included friends, family members, coworkers, or everyday acquaintances.
In addition to measuring hurt, anger, and grudge holding, Li and her colleagues asked participants to rate how immoral they believed the offender was. The findings showed the exact same interaction between hurt and anger on grudge holding. They also revealed that this emotional combination led victims to judge the offender as a bad or completely immoral person.
This harsh moral judgment in turn explained the persistence of the grudge against the offender. For the fourth study, the scientists used an experimental design to test whether the combination of hurt and anger actually causes grudges. They recruited 438 undergraduate students and randomly assigned them to recall a past offense that made them feel one of four specific ways.
Participants recalled an event where they felt only hurt, only angry, both hurt and angry, or neither hurt nor angry. Participants then rated the offender’s moral character and their own level of grudge holding. After accounting for how negative the overall event was, the researchers found that participants in the condition recalling both high hurt and high anger held the strongest grudges.
The scientists also tested alternative explanations, such as whether victims simply stopped caring about the offender’s overall wellbeing or prioritized themselves over the transgressor. Just as in the third study, only the act of viewing the offender as immoral explained why the combination of hurt and anger led to a stronger grudge. This suggests that the moral judgment of the offender is a key driving force behind maintaining a grudge.
“Hurt feelings can changes the meaning of anger in the development of grudges,” Li told PsyPost. “Anger often signals that something is wrong, but when it is accompanied by hurt, it can signal that the offense is deeply personal and intolerable within the relationship. When people feel both hurt and anger, they seem to change their moral judgment toward the offender from “good” or moral to “bad” or immoral. This shift in perception explains why hurt and anger interact to affect grudge-holding.”
“From this perspective, grudge holding can function as a form of self-protection by maintaining a level of vigilance against transgressors. It helps people remember the offense and guard them against future transgressions from the offender.”
While this research provides evidence about how grudges form, there are a few limitations to keep in mind. The experimental study relied on participants recalling past events rather than experiencing a standardized offense in a controlled laboratory setting. Because people’s memories of conflicts can vary widely in severity, this reliance on memory might introduce unseen inconsistencies.
Additionally, the researchers noted that the exact timeline of when hurt and anger emerge is still not perfectly understood. It is unclear if these emotions arise simultaneously or if one typically triggers the other during an ongoing conflict.
“Moving forward, we are currently trying to understand the shared meaning of hurt and anger in interpersonal conflicts, how people interpret these emotions, and how they shape relationship outcomes over time,” Li said. “We are also beginning to test the impact of grudge-holding on different victim, offender, and relationship variables.
“As well, we are especially interested in the role of culture. The meaning and the process of how hurt and anger lead to grudge holding may differ depending on social norms and relationship structures. To address this, we’d like to collect both qualitative and quantitative data from different geographical regions to examine how these emotional processes unfold across cultures.”
The study, “Understanding Grudges: The Interplay Between Hurt Feelings and Anger,” was authored by Jingyuan Sophie Li, C. Ward Struthers, Jewy Ferrer, Ola AlMakadma, Kai Wen Zhou, and Dmytro O. Rebrov.
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