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William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet - 1968 Movie

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William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet - 1968 Movie

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This 1968 movie adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet closely follows the original text. While this story is often examined as the downfall of star-crossed lovers, the tragic events of this play reveal the consequences of hot heads and the need for payback. With your class, you will explore elements of plot, characterization, and theme, focusing on how revenge serves as both a plot device and theme.

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Will knows what he has to do, and he's prepared to do it. As he steps into the elevator and sets out to avenge his brother's death, the ghosts of his brother's past force him to examine how this cycle of vengence destroys more than it repairs. Written in verse, Jason Reynold's Long Way Down is a fast-paced exploration of grief, revenge, and making difficult choices.

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Read 20.1k reviews from the world's largest community for readers. A cannon. A strap. A piece. A biscuit. A burner. A heater. A chopper. A gat. A hammer A ...

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Available in the school library. Audiobook available on Hoopla. 

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Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender is both a story of seeking revenge and an exploration of self-identify. Felix dreams of finding love like any other high school student, when he begins to receive anonymous transphobic messages after being publicly outed online. Felix's quest for revenge takes him on a journey of self identity and finding the love he deserves.

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Read 10.2k reviews from the world's largest community for readers. From Stonewall and Lambda Award-winning author Kacen Callender comes a revelatory YA nov...

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Available in the school library. Audiobook available on Hoopla. 

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This thriller by Courtney Summers follows Sadie as she sets out on a mission to avenge her sister's death but becomes a missing person herself. When a popular radio host picks up Sadie's story, her life becomes a crime solving podcast. Sadie's life becomes a podcast. How does her need for vindication affect her life?

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Redemption Over Revenge by Kwabena Nixon - Ted Talk

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Redemption Over Revenge by Kwabena Nixon - Ted Talk

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Kwabena Nixon's TedTalk "Redemption Over Revenge" combines lecture with poetry as he explores difficult choices he and people he's known have had to make and whether or not revenge is the answer. Nixon discusses how seeking revenge mpacts the ability to heal and move on.

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Redemption Over Revenge | Kwabena Nixon | TEDxCarrollUniversity

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Available in the school library. Audiobook available on Hoopla. 

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Angie Thomas's Concrete Rose, a prequel to The Hate U Give, examines what happens when revenge feels like a responsibility. Maverick juggles high school, dealing for the King Lords, and, now, a baby on the way. The need to avenge the murder of a loved one causes Maverick to decide what's important.

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International phenomenon Angie Thomas revisits Garden H…

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Available in the school library. Audiobook available on Hoopla. 

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Dive into some high school drama -- bullies, cheating, traumatic pasts -- with Jenny Han's Burn for Bun. A group of girlfriends team up to seek revenge on all of those who have made high school miserablef or them. Will they be vindicated?

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Postcard-perfect Jar Island is home to charming tourist…

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The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe - Visual Audio Book

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The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe - Visual Audio Book

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This short film adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" causes viewers to ask: what could offense could have led to need this level of revenge? How can the need for revenge turn into such hatred?

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William Blakes famous poem "The Poison Tree" considers the emotional impacts of allowing vengence to consume us.

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A Poison Tree by William Blake | Poetry Foundation

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Revenge by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse - Song with lyrics

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Revenge by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse - Song with lyrics

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This song, "Revenge," by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse explores the consequences of seeking revenge.

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Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse - Revenge [ with lyrics ]

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This quick video examines the science of what our brains do when we think about seeking revenge and how those thoughts are more often negative than positive. The video also gives ideas for other ways to feel closure after an offense other than seeking revenge.

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The Hidden Upsides of Revenge by Melissa Hogenboom - Article

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The Hidden Upsides of Revenge by Melissa Hogenboom - Article

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This article answers the question of why people seek revenge and explores how revenge shapes our society. This article complicates the idea that seeking revenge leads to negative consequences. Rather, the author examines a study that showed the pleasurable sides of agression.

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A tale of revenge is always bittersweet. Take the sack of Troy, as depicted in Homer's epic poem The Iliad. When Paris steals away Helen, her husband King Menelaus cannot bear the injustice and seeks to attack her seducer. He brings an entire army to Troy, waging a lengthy war that kills thousands.

The theme of revenge spirals through the entire narrative. When Achilles' best friend and cousin Patroklus is killed, he too seeks a reckless and bloody revenge.

Revenge has been part of human behaviour for almost as long as we have existed on Earth. Literature has used it throughout history, from Greek tragedies such as Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy - where Orestes wants to murder his mother to avenge his father - to Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Many of us have no doubt imagined vengeance against those who have wronged us, or even lashed out at them. In the moment, it can certainly feel cathartic to do so. But what motivates us to seek revenge in the first place? Researchers are gradually getting some answers, and they are finding that revenge has some unexpected upsides.

Revenge is a powerful emotional trigger that mobilises people into action. "It's this very pervasive experience in human lives, people from every society understand the idea of getting angry and wanting to hurt someone who has harmed you," says evolutionary psychologist Michael McCullough, of the University of Miami, who has spent over a decade studying revenge and forgiveness.

It drives crime - up to 20% of homicides and 60% of school shootings are linked to revenge, studies show. And it shapes politics too. Donald Trump's presidential victory, for instance, came as a result of "revenge of working-class whites... who felt abandoned by a rapidly globalising economy," according to an article in the Washington Post. The same sentiment is echoed by many other outlets.

While the topic of aggression is well-studied - its triggers include alcohol, being insulted and narcissistic personality traits - revenge is lesser understood. It is not easy to untangle from violent behaviour, making it a difficult topic to study. David Chester of Virginia Commonwealth University was initially studying aggression but quickly realised that there is often a lot more going on before a violent interaction. He refers to the emotions involved as the "psychological middlemen" - the thoughts and feelings that come between a provocation and an aggressive outcome. "I was curious, how do you take something like [receiving] an insult and how do you go from that to an aggressive response." The key, he believes, lies in the desire to retaliate. "So by the nature of trying to understand aggression I started studying revenge."

He set out to uncover more about what causes it. First he, along with his colleague Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky, discovered that a person who is insulted or socially rejected feels an emotional pain. The area in the brain associated with pain was most active in participants who went on to react with an aggressive response after feeling rejected. "It's tapping into an ancient evolved tendency to respond to threats and harm with aggressive retaliation," says Chester.

In a follow-up study he was surprised to find that emotional pain was intricately yoked with pleasure. That is, while rejection initially feels painful, it can quickly be masked by pleasure when presented with the opportunity to get revenge - it even activates the brain's known reward circuit, the nucleus accumbens. People who are provoked behave aggressively precisely because it can be "hedonically rewarding", Chester found. Revenge it seems really can be sweet.

The link between aggression and pleasure itself is not new. The "father of psychology" Sigmund Freud was well aware that it could feel cathartic to behave aggressively, but the idea that revenge provides its own special form of pleasure has only become apparent recently.

To understand this further, Chester and DeWall set up a series of experiments, published in the March 2017 journal of Personality and Social Psychology, where the participants were made to feel rejected by being purposely left out of a computerised ball tossing game. All participants were then allowed to put pins in a virtual voodoo doll. Those in the rejected camp stabbed their doll with significantly more pins. This rejection test was first done remotely online and later replicated with different participants brought into the lab. In the lab version, rather than a voodoo doll, participants acted out their "revenge" by blasting a prolonged, unpleasantly loud noise to their opponents (who were computers, not real people, which the participants were not aware of). Again, those that felt most rejected subjected their rivals to longer noise blasts.

Lastly, to understand the role of emotion in the desire to seek revenge, Chester and DeWall gave participants what they believed was a mood-inhibiting drug (it was in fact only a harmless vitamin tablet). Still, the placebo effect was so strong that the participants who took the "drug" didn't bother to retaliate against the people who rejected them - whereas those that were not given the placebo acted far more aggressively. The placebo group, it seems, did not seek revenge because they believed they would feel no pleasure from doing so.

Taking these results together the team came to a startling conclusion. Not only can revenge give people pleasure, but people seek it precisely because of the anticipation it will do so. "It's about the experience of regulating emotions," says Chester. And it worked. After having the opportunity to get revenge, the rejected individuals scored the same on mood tests as those who had not been rejected.

This finding, however, does need to be taken with a necessary pinch of salt. There are currently no long-term follow up studies on how revenge feels days or weeks after the act. Preliminary - as yet unpublished results - show that revenge-seekers only get a momentary feeling of pleasure, Chester found. "Just like a lot of things, it feels good in the moment. That begins a cycle and it starts to look like an addiction... then afterwards you feel worse than when you started," he explains.

And that might help explain why those who seek the high of revenge fail to anticipate disastrous personal consequences. The footballer Zinedine Zidane, for instance, will forever be remembered for head-butting Marco Matterazzi in the 2006 World Cup. Along a similar vein, Richard Nixon is well-known for his list of foes, the goal being to "screw his political enemies". Some of his dirty tricks later led to his forced resignation.

The question then becomes, why has this seemingly destructive behaviour persisted in our evolution if it can cause us so much trouble?

The answer is that far from an evolutionary mistake, revenge serves a very useful purpose. Michael McCullough puts it this way: although people might say seeking revenge "is really bad for you" - that it might ruin your relationships, for example - the fact that it exists at all is a very good thing. Its main goal is to work as deterrent, which in turn has clear advantages for our survival. Consider prison or gang culture, where if you meddle with the wrong person, revenge attacks are a sure consequence. "If you have a reputation for someone who is going to seek retribution, people are not going to mess with you or take advantage," says Chester. In Leonardo DiCaprio's Oscar-winning performance in The Revenant, so powerful is his desire for revenge that it keeps him alive. With broken bones and open wounds, he drags himself through a hostile and dangerous terrain to avenge his son's killer.

Even the threat of revenge might deter an attack, says McCullough. "The individual who responds to that harm is going to do better than the individual who takes the slap on the cheek and lets the bad guy have his way." Just like hunger, he considers it a primal urge that needs to be itched. Only then can the avenger move on "because that goal has been fulfilled", in a similar way that we only stop feeling hungry after we have satiated our appetite.

So if a main purpose of revenge is about deterring harm, it is a very good thing indeed. That is not to say, says McCullough, that we should encourage people to indulge in seeking revenge. "We can both appreciate what it's for, understand it's not the product of afflicted minds, and also have an interest in helping people curtail their desire for revenge," he says.

It might also be comforting to know that not everyone acts out on their desire to seek revenge. One 2006 study found that men get more pleasure from the idea of revenge. Male participants were found to have more activity in the reward circuit of the brain than women when they saw cheating opponents receive an electric shock. In another 2008 study, Ozlem Ayduk of the University of California, Berkeley and colleagues, found that those with specific personality types were more likely to act violently after rejection. She found that certain individuals had higher levels of "rejection sensitivity" - who were more likely to expect rejection based on past experiences.

These individuals were also found to be more neurotic and to show anxiety and depression. "They have this tendency to see rejection even where it doesn't exist. Rejection is an existential threat, so that expectation [of rejection] actually prepares - both mentally and physiologically - the person to defend themselves," says Ayduk. Retaliatory aggression for these individuals was therefore a "knee-jerk" reaction to feeling rejected.

It is important to note that not everyone who has the "rejection sensitive profile" has violent tendencies. Some deal with their feelings of rejection in other ways, such as self-harm. "Somehow this makes people feel that they are in control of something. Aggression is only one of the responses," says Ayduk.

As well as that, those who are more prone to retaliatory aggression can learn ways to overcome their outbursts, in a similar way that an addict can learn to control his or her urges with various psychological tactics. When Chester and DeWall peered into individuals' brains during one of their revenge studies, they found that those who were able to restrain themselves from acting out showed brain activation in the lateral pre-frontal cortex, an area known to be important for reasoning and inhibiting impulsive actions. "So we're not doomed to succumb to our revengeful impulses. We have evolved this very sophisticated pre-frontal cortex that can inhibit impulsive behaviour and guide it to more social outcomes. There is hope whether we're aware of it or not."

So next time you are plotting revenge against someone who has wronged you, know that the anticipation of revenge may feel good in the moment, but don't expect these hidden "upsides" to last for long. Rather, understand that this feeling is there for a very good reason, and it could well have protected many of your ancient ancestors from being taken advantage of.
- Melissa Hogenboom is BBC Earth's feature writer. She is Join 800,000+ Future fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter. @melissasuzanneh on Twitter.
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.

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A tale of revenge is always bittersweet. Take the sack of Troy, as depicted in Homer's epic poem The Iliad. When Paris steals away Helen, her husband King Menelaus cannot bear the injustice and seeks to attack her seducer. He brings an entire army to Troy, waging a lengthy war that kills thousands.

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The Complicated Psychology of Revenge by Eric Jaffe

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The Complicated Psychology of Revenge by Eric Jaffe

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This article explores the complex ways that revenge can affect us, discussing both the negative consequences and emotions that revenge can cause and the circumstances that can allow revenge to feel good.

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Association for Psychological Science - APS

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A few years ago a group of Swiss researchers scanned the brains of people who had been wronged during an economic exchange game. These people had trusted their partners to split a pot of money with them, only to find that the partners had chosen to keep the loot for themselves. The researchers then gave the people a chance to punish their greedy partners, and for a full minute, as the victims contemplated revenge, the activity in their brains was recorded. The decision caused a rush of neural activity in the caudate nucleus, an area of the brain known to process rewards (in previous work, the caudate has delighted in cocaine and nicotine use). The findings, published in a 2004 issue of Science, gave physiological confirmation to what the scorned have been saying for years: Revenge is sweet.

A thirst for vengeance is nothing if not timeless. It is as classic as Homer and Hamlet, and as contemporary as Don Corleone and Quentin Tarantino; as old as the eyes and teeth traded in the Bible, and as fresh as the raid that took the life of Osama bin Laden. But while the idea of revenge is no doubt delectable - the very phrase "just desserts" promises a treat - much of its sugar is confined to the coating. The actual execution of revenge carries a bitter cost of time, emotional and physical energy, and even lives. That minute before revenge is savory, as the authors of the Science study recognized; but what about the days and weeks that follow?

In the past few years, psychological scientists have discovered many ways in which the practice of revenge fails to fulfill its sweet expectations. Behavioral scientists have observed that instead of quenching hostility, revenge can prolong the unpleasantness of the original offense and that merely bringing harm upon an offender is not enough to satisfy a person's vengeful spirit. They have also found that instead of delivering justice, revenge often creates only a cycle of retaliation, in part because one person's moral equilibrium rarely aligns with another's. The upshot of these insights is a better sense of why the pursuit of revenge has persisted through the ages, despite tasting a lot more sour than advertised.
Keeping Wounds Green
Many early psychological views toward revenge were based on the larger concept of emotional catharsis. This idea, still widely held in the popular culture, suggests that venting aggression ultimately purges it from the body. But empirical research failed to validate the theory of catharsis, and some recent work contradicts it entirely. In a 2002 paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, APS Fellow Brad Bushman of The Ohio State University reported higher levels of aggression in people who had supposedly vented their anger than in those who had done nothing at all.

If cathartic activity fails to dissolve hostility in general, what is to say revenge will dissolve the anger caused by one offense in particular? That doubt laid the foundation for a recent series of tests led by Kevin Carlsmith of Colgate, who conducted the research with APS Fellows and Charter Members Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard. Wilson and Gilbert have often found that people make powerful mistakes when predicting how they will feel about something in the future; with Carlsmith, they asked whether people could be wrong about the expected emotional benefits of revenge as well. Perhaps revenge is sweet, or perhaps the words of Francis Bacon are more accurate: "A man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal, and do well."

For the study, Carlsmith and his collaborators placed participants into groups of four and gave each a dollar, which they could either invest in a group pot or keep for themselves. To entice investment, the researchers promised to add a 40 percent dividend to the group total before redistributing the boosted pot among all four members. This created a classic experimental dilemma: what's best for the group is for all four members to donate their dollar, but what's best for the individual is to keep the dollar and also receive one quarter of the final pot distribution, which grows through the investments of the others - in other words, as the researchers put it, to be a "free rider."

At the end of the trial, participants discovered that one member - secretly controlled by the researchers - had acted as a free rider. Some of the participants, called "non-punishers," learned about this moral violation but were given no chance to do anything about it. Others, known as "punishers," were given the chance to avenge the selfish behavior by reducing the earnings of the offender. (The decision to punish carried a small fee, to simulate the personal cost of revenge.) Both punishers and non-punishers rated their feelings immediately after the game, as well as 10 minutes later. A final group, dubbed "forecasters," had no power to punish but recorded how they expected to feel if they could.

The findings were exactly as Francis Bacon had imagined: Punishers actually felt worse than forecasters predicted they would have felt had they been given the chance to be punishers. Punishers even felt worse than non-punishers, despite getting the chance to take their revenge. Ten minutes after the game, punishers continued to brood on the free rider significantly more than the others did - an "increased rumination" that prevented them from moving on, the researchers surmised. All told, Carlsmith and company concluded in a 2008 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, people erroneously believe revenge will make them feel better and help them gain closure, when in actuality punishers ruminate on their deed and feel worse than those who cannot avenge a wrong.

"I think uncertainty prolongs and enhances emotional experiences, and one of the things that avengers do unintentionally is to prolong the unpleasant encounter," Carlsmith says. "Those who don't have a chance to take revenge are forced, in a sense, to move on and focus on something different. And they feel happier."
Delivering a Message
That most people fail to feel good after revenge does not mean revenge can never feel good. The hunt for this pleasant side of retribution has driven the recent work of German psychological scientist Mario Gollwitzer. "I think that taking revenge has generally a low chance of being successful or satisfying for the avenger," says Gollwitzer. "I was interested in those instances in which revenge can be 'sweet,' and I wondered what it exactly is that makes revenge sweet for the avenger." In the service of that interest, Gollwitzer has designed some beautifully elaborate experiments; after all, he says, it takes "careful calibration" to provoke a strong response from participants while remaining inside the ethical boundaries of institutional review boards. (How much more might we learn about revenge, one can't help but think, if researchers were allowed to murder a participant's father and marry the mother?)

Gollwitzer has explored two theories for why revenge could be satisfying. The first is known as "comparative suffering," the idea that simply seeing an offender suffer restores an emotional balance to the universe. If this were the case, then victims of wrongdoing who learn of an offender's misfortune should feel equally satisfied whether or not they were personally responsible for that misfortune. The second theory - the "understanding hypothesis" - holds that an offender's suffering is not enough, on its own, to achieve truly satisfactory revenge. Instead, the avenger must be assured that the offender has made a direct connection between the retaliation and the initial behavior.

In one recent study, Gollwitzer and his collaborators asked participants to solve anagrams and assigned them a partner who was presumably doing the same in another room. Each correctly solved anagram earned the team a raffle ticket for a gift certificate worth €25. At the end of the trial, the researchers asked participants to divide the tickets fairly. Most participants chose an equal split, but the partners - actually research confederates - assigned almost all of the tickets to themselves. When participants were informed of this decision, they were given the chance to reduce their partner's ticket total. About 60 percent of participants took this chance to the fullest, leaving the partner many fewer tickets than the initial fair distribution had provided. In a practical sense, these participants had taken revenge on the partner's unjust action.

Other studies might have stopped there, but Gollwitzer took the additional step of giving avengers the chance to send their partner a message. The majority of those who chose to write this retaliatory note made reference to the injustice ("Sorry for taking tickets away, but unfortunately, you only cared about yourself," one wrote). In response, the avengers then received one of two types of replies prepared by the researchers. Some of these, meant to test the revenge theory of understanding, acknowledged that the retaliation had come as a result of their selfish behavior. Other messages, meant to test "comparative suffering," showed no such understanding and even expressed a little indignation over their reduced ticket total. To conclude the test, the researchers asked all participants to rate their level of satisfaction with the exchange.

The findings suggest that revenge can succeed only when an offender understands why the act of vengeance has occurred. Among participants who chose to avenge the selfish action, those who received a message of understanding reported much more satisfaction than did those who received an indignant response. In fact, the only time avengers felt more satisfaction than participants who took no revenge at all was when they received an indication of understanding. Put another way, unacknowledged revenge felt no better than none at all. Successful revenge is therefore about more than payback, the authors conclude in the April 2011 issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology; it is about delivering a message.

"The finding that it is the offender's recognizing of his wrongdoing that makes revenge sweet seems to suggest that - from the avenger's perspective - revenge entails a message," Gollwitzer says. "If the message is not delivered, it cannot reestablish justice."
Your Justice or Mine
The reestablishment of universal justice certainly seems to be at the heart of revenge. In early 2001, a research team led by Cheryl Kaiser of Michigan State surveyed people for their belief in a just world by seeing how much they agreed with statements like "I feel that people get what they deserve." After the September 11 attacks, Kaiser and colleagues returned to these people and assessed their responses to the event. In a 2004 issue of Psychological Science, the researchers reported that the more a person had believed in a just world before the attacks, the more this person experienced distress after them - and the greater this person's desire for revenge.

The problem with a revenge structure based on rectifying injustice is that the definition of justice varies from person to person - and, even within a single person, from perspective to perspective. A few years ago, a group of researchers led by Arlene Stillwell of the State University of New York at Potsdam asked people to describe two events that had occurred in their lives: one instance in which they had responded to an offense with retribution, and another in which they had been on the receiving end of revenge.

Stillwell and her collaborators found that when people were avengers they believed their action had fairly restored equity to the relationship; when they were the recipients of revenge, however, they considered the payback excessive. This shifting viewpoint explains why revenge often occurs in endless cycles; no sooner did U.S. Navy Seals avenge September 11 by killing Osama bin Laden, for instance, than Al Qaeda vowed to seek revenge for his death.

"Successful revenge appears to make the avengers feel satisfied that equity has been restored, but in many cases the recipient of revenge will perceive the aftermath of revenge as marked by inequity and negative out comes," Stillwell and her coauthors conclude in a 2008 issue of Basic and Applied Social Psychology. "The divergent perceptions of avenger and recipient will make it difficult to bring an end to the cycle of revenge in a way that both avenger and recipient will regard as satisfying, positive, and fair."
Beyond Revenge
The long history of vengeance in art suggests a basic instinct for retribution ingrained in the human spirit. Indeed, recent facts largely confirm this age-old fiction: Revenge has been cited as a factor in one in five murders that occur in developed countries, and a report from 2002 found that between 1974 and 2000 three in five school shootings in the United States were driven by vengeance. At the lighter end of the spectrum, the popular urge for payback has inspired some business ventures. Rahm Emanuel reportedly once hired a company called Enough is Enough to avenge a polling error, and although a recent call to this business found it defunct, a newer outfit, Alibis & Paybacks, currently advertises its services in Los Angeles.

But if revenge tastes so bad to the person, why does it remain a favorite dish of the people? In response to this apparent contradiction, many psychological scientists have embraced an evolutionary explanation of revenge. Michael McCullough and Benjamin Tabak of the University of Miami, along with Robert Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania, recently prepared a book chapter that outlines payback's adaptive function. They argue that individual acts of vengeance serve as group announcements that certain behaviors will elicit retaliation. In other words, the purpose of revenge might be less about responding to one particular offense than about preventing several others.

Seen this way, revenge provides a great cultural benefit - leading to more cooperative, and therefore productive, societies - in exchange for its great personal costs. This larger function takes three forms, McCullough and his coauthors argue. The first is through direct deterrence. Simply put, revenge directly discourages an aggressor from subsequently performing the same offense. The second effect of revenge is indirect. By avenging specific actions, a person can establish a general definition of acceptable conduct and, in the process, avoid future confrontation. In this sense, reputation precludes revenge.

The third adaptive function of revenge goes beyond simple deterrence of negative behaviors and actually coerces beneficial ones. To understand this idea, says McCullough, it helps to envision life as an early human. Suppose in that existence you and a neighbor must take turns guarding your camps from jaguar attacks. If you fall asleep one night and the animal kills a neighbor's child, this negligence, in the eyes of natural selection, is functionally similar to killing the neighbor's child directly. The threat of revenge in response to such failed cooperation - a concept known as altruistic punishment - would entice you to stay awake (with the expectation, of course, that your neighbor will do the same on his watch).

Pervasive as this revenge instinct may seem, modern civilization can feel fortunate that resisting the urge to retaliate is even more common. The decision to forego vengeance is not necessary born of human kindness; on the contrary, the body may have evolved some type of internal scale that weighs the adaptive benefits of revenge against its various costs - from the potential for retaliation to the severance of important relationships. More often than not in today's world, this scale tips in favor of forgiveness.

"You have to have some way of maintaining relationships, even though it's inevitable some will harm your interests, given enough time," says McCullough, who is also the author of Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct (2008). "We think what has evolved is a secondary system" - the forgiveness instinct - "that enables people to suppress the desire for revenge and signal their willingness to continue on, even though someone has harmed their interests, assuming the person will refrain from doing so again in the future." That might not be the most uplifting interpretation of how the brain governs human relations, but it is at least a relatively peaceful one.

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A few years ago a group of Swiss researchers scanned the brains of people who had been wronged during an economic exchange game. These people had trusted their partners to split a pot of money with them, only to find that the partners had chosen to keep the loot for themselves.

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Why do people seek revenge? What triggers the need to seek revenge despite the consequences? These sources will help you explore the science behind the revenge as you follow how characters in your independent reading selection grapple with the desire for retribution. Explore the following resources to help you better understand the motivations behind the desire for vengeance.

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How do different genres approach similar themes? You've watched Romeo and Juliet and are reading your choice novel. How do other forms of literature and art express the effects and consequences of seeking revenge? Explore the following resources to examine how various genres express similar themes.

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As you watch and analyze Romeo and Juliet with your class, you will also read an independent novel that explores the effects of revenge. You will examine plot elements, how characters are developed and interact with each other, and what your author has to say about the consequences of seeking revenge. You will choose one of the following novels:

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The desire for revenge is a natural human reaction to feeling slighted or wronged. In some cases, people feel a responsibility to avenge harm done against them or someone they love. But does seeking revenge ultimately end up helping people heal or does it cause more harm?

During this unit, you will how revenge impacts everyone involved. Is seeking revenge ever justified? How is the cycle of revenge created and perpetuated? Can it be stopped? What are the consequences of seeking revenge?