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contempt

Feeling or attitude of regarding someone or something as inferior, base, or worthless

Entityadvanced emotion anger prototype emotionQ5338825

Instance of: advanced emotion
, anger prototype emotion
Subclass of: anger or disgust
, emotion lexical occurrence
Part of: theory of emotion
, psychological terminology

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

In colloquial usage, contempt usually refers to either the act of despising, or having a general lack of respect for something. This set of emotions generally produces maladaptive behaviour. Other authors define contempt as a negative emotion rather than the constellation of mentality and feelings that produce an attitude. Paul Ekman categorises contempt as the seventh basic emotion, along with anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. Robert C. Solomon places contempt on the same emotional continuum as resentment and anger, and he argues that the differences between the three are that resentment is anger directed towards a higher-status individual; anger is directed towards an equal-status individual; and contempt is anger directed towards a lower-status individual.

Overview

All data

38 statements · 37% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Opposite of: Achtung (ethics)
esteem
Said to be the same as: scorn
jesting
Members / parts: anger
disgust

On other databases

19 identifiers linking contempt across the web's reference databases

Data quality

statements

37%

externally sourced

Source last edited October 22, 2026. AIDB refreshes this page daily.

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AIDB. (2026). contempt (Q5338825). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/contempt-Q5338825