New research published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin provides evidence that holding grudges is caused by a specific emotional cocktail that mixes both hurt feelings and anger. This finding suggests that when these two emotions are combined, victims tend to view the person who wronged them as fundamentally immoral, which fosters lasting resentment. This psychological change acts as a type of self-defense, helping people protect themselves from future harm by maintaining vigilance against those who have betrayed them.
Building close social bonds is a basic need for human survival, but relationships are inevitably threatened when one party causes harm to the other. When someone is wronged, they can respond by seeking revenge or by offering forgiveness. Although revenge aims to deter future harm by imposing a price on the offender, retaliation tends to escalate conflict and irreparably damage relationships.
Forgiveness serves as a friendly response to preserving the relationship, but it also comes with significant downsides. People can be victimized repeatedly without the offender facing any real consequences. Holding a grudge provides another response that acts as a psychological protective shield.
Resentment is defined as a persistent negative emotion that diminishes over time but is easily reactivated when reminded of the crime. Victims can protect themselves from ongoing threats by maintaining a level of vigilance toward the person who betrayed them. Past research has typically investigated how emotions such as anger and hurt operate independently after a conflict.
Anger usually indicates a sense of injustice, an imbalance of power, and a desire to confront the offender. Hurt feelings reflect vulnerability, emotional dependence, and damaged social bonds. Being hurt is often associated with social pain and a sense of devaluation, which highlights how much a person values a particular relationship.
But scientists suspected that looking at these emotions in isolation might be missing the complete psychological picture. “We found important gaps in the literature. One of the gaps was the lack of conceptual and theoretical research on grudge retention,” explained study author Jinyuan-Sophie Lee, a doctoral candidate at York University in Canada.
“Recently, Van Montjou and colleagues interviewed about 20 people who held grudges and developed a conceptual definition of the emotion of resentment, which is a persistent feeling of hurt and anger that fades over time but is activated when needed. However, this definition had not been tested quantitatively. We did not yet know whether hurt and anger both contribute to feelings of resentment, or how they work together.”
“Another gap in the literature was the lack of empirical evidence regarding factors that contribute to resentment retention. To address these gaps, we began by testing the role of victims’ hurt feelings and anger in the formation of resentment. We did not yet know whether, how, or why they contribute. Previous research has shown 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 interaction between hurt and anger,” Lee explained. “So we asked what happens when people feel hurt and angry at the same time. We hypothesized that the interaction of these two emotions is particularly likely to lead to resentment retention. We also began testing hypotheses about why hurt feelings and anger interact to influence resentment retention.”
The researchers designed four studies to investigate how the combination of hurt and anger affects the likelihood of holding long-term grudges. They also wanted to investigate whether this combination of emotions changes victims’ moral judgments about the person who hurt them. In the first study, researchers recruited 242 adults from the community who were currently in a romantic relationship.
Participants were asked to write about a recent unresolved conflict with a significant other. They then rated their level of hurt and anger on a numerical scale of 1 to 7. Participants also completed a questionnaire measuring how strongly they held a grudge, including ratings of feelings of contempt and expectations that the harm would not be easily resolved.
Scientists have found that feelings of hurt and anger interact to predict resentment holding. Participants who experienced high levels of both hurt and anger reported significantly more resentment than participants who felt only one emotion or the other. Neither emotion could independently give rise to strong resentment without the presence of the other.
To confirm that these findings were reliable, the researchers conducted a second study with a larger sample of 694 adults in romantic relationships. This setup mirrored the first study, in which participants were reminded of the conflict and asked to rate their emotional responses. The results replicated the original study and provided 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. Researchers recruited 463 undergraduate students and asked them to recall the most recent unsolved crime someone had committed in their lives. This includes friends, family, co-workers, and everyday acquaintances.
In addition to measuring hurt, anger, and grudge-holding, Lee and colleagues asked participants to rate how immoral they believed the perpetrator was. They found exactly the same interaction between hurt and anger when holding a grudge. They also found that this emotional combination led victims to judge their perpetrators as bad or even downright immoral.
This harsh moral judgment may explain the persistence of resentment toward criminals. In a fourth study, scientists used an experimental design to test whether the combination of hurt and anger actually causes resentment. They recruited 438 undergraduate students and randomly assigned them to recall a past crime that made them feel one of four specific emotions.
Participants recalled events in which they felt only hurt, only anger, hurt and anger, or neither hurt nor anger. Next, participants rated the offender’s moral character and their own level of resentment. The researchers found that after taking into account how negative the entire event was, participants in the condition where they remembered both high hurt and high anger held the most resentment.
The scientists also tested alternative explanations, such as whether victims simply stopped caring about the offender’s overall well-being or prioritized themselves over the offender. Similar to the third study, only the act of viewing the perpetrator as immoral explained why the combination of hurt and anger led to stronger resentment. This suggests that the offender’s moral judgment is an important driving force in maintaining resentment.
“Hurt feelings can change the meaning of anger in the development of resentment,” Lee told SciPost. “Anger often indicates something is wrong, but when accompanied by hurt, it can indicate that the attack is deeply personal and intolerable within the relationship. Feeling both hurt and anger appears to shift one’s moral judgment of the perpetrator from one that is ‘good’ or moral to one that is ‘bad’ or immoral.” This change in perception explains why hurt and anger interact to influence grudge retention.
“From this perspective, holding a grudge may function as a form of self-defense by maintaining a level of vigilance toward the offender. It helps people remember the crime and protect themselves from future crimes by the offender.”
Although this study provides evidence about how resentment is formed, there are some limitations to keep in mind. This experimental study relied on participants recalling past events rather than experiencing standardized crimes in a controlled laboratory environment. People’s memories of conflicts vary widely in severity, so relying on memories can lead to invisible discrepancies.
Additionally, the researchers noted that the exact timeline of when hurt or anger appears is still not fully understood. It is unclear whether these emotions occur simultaneously or whether one typically triggers the other during an ongoing conflict.
“We are currently working to understand the common meanings of hurt and anger in interpersonal conflicts, how people interpret these emotions, and how they shape relationship outcomes over time,” Lee said. “We are also beginning to test the effects of grudge holding on a variety of victim, perpetrator, and relationship variables.
“Similarly, we are particularly interested in the role of culture. The meanings and processes of how hurt and anger lead to resentment can vary depending on social norms and relationship structures. To address this, we hope to collect both qualitative and quantitative data from different geographic regions and investigate how these emotional processes play out across cultures.”
The study, “Understanding Resentment: The Interplay of Hurt Emotions and Anger,” was authored by Jingyuan Sophie Li, C. Ward Struthers, Jewy Ferrer, Ola AlMakadma, Kai Wen Zhou, and Dmytro O. Rebrov.
