People commit acts of revenge to make themselves feel better, study suggests

A new study has suggested the reason people undertake acts of revenge is to make themselves feel normal again after being rejected.

The study, recently published in the Journal of Personality of Social Psychology, found that rejected individuals tended to seek revenge more to balance themselves out and feel right again rather than to inflict suffering on the person who spurned them.

“Revenge had a much larger emotion-repairing effect than expected,” Professor David Chester, one of the study’s researchers told Broadly, “Aggression is a means to an end, that end being a return to a state of emotional balance and homeostasis. It’s not about the harm inflicted upon the target per se, but more about what that harm allows the individual to feel.”

The study monitored over 1,500 participants across six studies to see if the rejection-aggression link is motivated by the expectation that the mood will repair and that the mood will repair through the positive effects of retaliatory aggression or revenge.

In one study, participants were assigned to write an essay about a time when they felt very angry which they were told would be exchanged over the internet with a partner. Participants were then randomly given good or bad feedback such as “great essay” or “one of the worst essays that I have EVER read!”. Participants then completed a Voodoo Doll Task and were told the doll represented their partner from the essay task.

Researchers monitored their moods and found the “aggression was successful at reducing participants’ negative affect who had received negative feedback and increasing their positive affect, whereas no such effect occurred among participants who received positive feedback”.

The study concluded: “We consistently found that rejected individuals acted aggressively but only if they expected that aggression might repair their aversive state.”

While aggressive retaliative behaviour is often not advised, Professor Chester suggested there could be other ways to restore your mind back to a balanced state after experiencing rejection.

"If aggression is an emotion-regulation strategy, then you simply need to supplant it with another strategy. For individuals who find themselves motivated to enact revenge, they may only need to find another behaviour that provides the mood repair that they need. Alternatives such as exercise and mindfulness exercises seem like promising avenues that we should test as effective replacements for revenge-seeking."