Before He Cheats: A Popular Culture Analysis

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2021

Background: This research examines how, when a romantic partner commits a perceived transgression that leads to couple break up, vengeful reactions are predicted by the type of transgression and the Dark Triad of personality. Methods: An incidental sample of 2142 participants, half male and half female aged 18 to 70, completed a questionnaire developed by the authors to assess how they had reacted after being the perceived victims of a transgression committed by their partner and a measure of the Dark Triad. Results: Results show half of the people who feel as though they are victims of a partner transgression show revenge reactions. These reactions are more emotional than rational and do not usually anticipate their consequences or success. Moreover, revenge is related primarily to psychopathy and to a lesser extent to Machiavellianism. Psychopathy is the best predictor for revenge thoughts and actions, whereas narcissism does not predict revenge when controlling for other dark tra...

2008

Although its consequences can be devastating, revenge is surprisingly understudied. In this dissertation, I address several key questions. For example, are the factors that trigger revenge the same across different individuals? What are the psychological processes that facilitate revenge? Does revenge have any adaptive value? These issues were addressed with a series of three studies. Study 1 explored whether personality predictors of self-reported revenge generalize across four specific transgressions. Results indicated that narcissists were only vengeful after social rejection whereas psychopaths and neurotics tended to be vengeful across transgressions. Study 2 expanded on these results by exploring trait-level vengeful fantasies and vengeful behaviors and the impact of a potential mediator, namely, anger rumination. Neuroticism was shown to be predictive of vengeful fantasies: This association was entirely mediated by anger rumination. Psychopathy predicted vengeful behavior: This association was partially mediated by vengeful fantasies. Study 3 involved the analysis of participants" personal anecdotes about how they reacted to transgressions against them. Coded variables included revenge as well as 10 other coping behaviors: These 11 predictors were then evaluated with respect to their impact on both immediate relief and long-term recovery. Although the revenge option fostered immediate relief, it did not benefit long-term recovery. Only one coping behavior (meaning-making) actually fostered recovery. The contributions and limitations of this research plus suggestions for future studies are discussed. vi

Revenge is universal in human cultures, and is essentially personal and retributive. Its moral status is contested, as is its rationality. Revenge is traditionally associated with pleasure, but this association is not accounted for in contemporary philosophical treatments of revenge. Here I supply a theory of normal narcissistic functioning that can explain this association. Normal narcissism is an adaptive form of inter-psychic processing which has to do with the regulation of a coherent set of meta-representations of the agent. It can be given a general account by integrating views drawn from clinical traditions, empirical psychology, and contemporary cognitive neuroscience. I explore the neural correlates of normal narcissism, its characteristic accompanying emotions and pleasures/displeasures, and its fundamental dynamics. It is proposed that this allostatic regulatory system plays a prominent role in retributive behavior, including revenge. Revenge is understood as a form of narcissistic repair, and a variety of puzzles concerning revenge (e.g., delay, urgency, pleasure) are solved from this point of view.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2013

We focus on two aspects: First, we argue that it is necessary to include implicit forgiveness as an additional adaptive behavioral option to the perception of interpersonal transgressions. Second, we present one possible way to investigate the cognitive-affective underpinnings of revenge and forgiveness: a functional MRI (fMRI) approach aiming at integrating forgiveness and revenge mechanisms into a single paradigm.

2001

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2008

People expect to reap hedonic rewards when they punish an offender, but in at least some instances, revenge has hedonic consequences that are precisely the opposite of what people expect. Three studies showed that (a) one reason for this is that people who punish continue to ruminate about the offender, whereas those who do not punish "move on" and think less about the offender, and (b) people fail to appreciate the different affective consequences of witnessing and instigating punishment.

Religions

We pursue a multi-leveled phenomenological exploration of revenge. Revenge’s puzzle is to give an account of what exactly revenge accomplishes when it apparently cannot alter the past or remedy the initiating harm. The structure of revenge consists of one harmed, the perception of harm and suffering, and one perceived as responsible for the harm. The situation is apperceived as a negatively saturated experience; as such, it binds and has a hold on the one harmed, constituting her as enthralled. Revenge seeks to remedy the situation by the intentional act of objectifying, constituting, and finitizing the infinite situation. This is accomplished by constituting the guilty one as guilty, thereby mastering, in some measure, the saturated situation. We suggest that the realm and machinery required for this process is found in the realm of the imagination, where similarity and association of ideas and concepts are at play. Saturation plays at the edge of this realm as alien. It is by way ...

Personality and Individual Differences, 2014

Based on I 3 theory, the present study investigated a model in which the Dark Triad of personality traits (Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy) influence the rated likelihood of engaging in revenge against a romantic partner. We presented participants with a hypothetical act of infidelity, hypothesizing that the Dark Triad would relate positively to factors that could impel revenge (perceptions of revenge effectiveness and endorsement of goals related to power and justice) and negatively to factors that could inhibit revenge (perceptions of revenge costliness and endorsement of goals related to relationship maintenance). Although the Dark Triad bore substantial indirect relationships to the rated likelihood of taking revenge through our postulated impelling factors, our hypothesized inhibiting factors did not substantially inhibit revenge. Implications of these findings are discussed.

2013

Conventional wisdom suggests that individuals who decide to get even are driven by their emotions and cannot be swayed by considering the potential consequences of their actions. If this is the case, then perceptions of revenge's consequences-its effectiveness and costliness-should be unrelated to the likelihood of taking revenge. The present study examined the relationships between these variables among 199 undergraduates. We had participants imagine that their romantic partners had cheated on them, and asked them to list the consequences, both positive and negative, of getting even, along with their perceptions of how effective and how costly revenge would be. We also asked participants to rate their endorsement of particular goals following a provocation. Ratings of revenge's effectiveness are largely related to the positive consequences of getting even, while ratings of revenge's costliness are largely related to revenge's negative consequences. Goal endorsement is related to perceiving some potential responses to a provocation as more effective than others. Judgments of effectiveness and costliness predicted significant variance in the likelihood of engaging in revenge (R 2 = .59) suggesting that perceptions of effectiveness and costliness may play a more important role in revenge decision making than previously thought. A significant Effectiveness X Costliness X Anger interaction (β = .89, p = .02) helps clarify how such perceptions are related to the likelihood of getting even. Implications and future directions are discussed.

International Journal of Sciences, 2022

Lin and Frank (2016) failed to replicate findings from a study on self-reflection and vengeance conducted by Exline and colleagues (2008), which reported that males who self-reflected upon their potential for wrongdoing were less likely to seek revenge than males who did not self-reflect. Using novel data methods on Lin and Frank's data, Grice and colleagues (2017) discovered a multivariate profile that successfully differentiated between the groups of men. The present studies further assess the replicability of Exline and colleagues' (2008) and Grice and colleagues' (2017) work. Study 1 failed to replicate any of the findings. Studies 2 and 3 investigate explanations for the failed replications by modifying item response format. Implications and explanations for the unsuccessful replications are discussed.