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Some people are born to hate and others are born to love, new research suggests.

Researchers have discovered that a person's "dispositional attitude" determines whether an individual becomes a hater or a lover.

For instance, people with a positive dispositional attitude have a strong tendency to like things, whereas people with a negative dispositional attitude have a strong tendency to dislike things.

"The dispositional attitude construct represents a new perspective in which attitudes are not simply a function of the properties of the stimuli under consideration, but are also a function of the properties of the evaluator," researchers wrote in the study.

"[For example], at first glance, it may not seem useful to know someone's feelings about architecture when assessing their feelings about health care. After all, health care and architecture are independent stimuli with unique sets of properties, so attitudes toward these objects should also be independent," researchers explained.

However, the individual forming the attitudes

"Some people may simply be more prone to focusing on positive features and others on negative features," lead researcher Justin Hepler of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said in a news release.

To find out whether people differ in tendency to like or dislike things, researchers created a scale that requires people to report their attitudes toward a wide variety of unrelated stimuli, such as architecture, cold showers, politics, and soccer.

Researchers then averaged together the responses and calculated the dispositional attitudes (i.e., to calculate how much they tend to like or dislike things in general) of individual participants.

Researchers predicted that individuals differ in the general tendency to like versus dislike objects, and that their attitudes toward independent object may actually be related.

Researchers found that people with generally positive dispositional attitudes are more open than people with generally negative dispositional attitudes. That means, people with positive dispositional attitudes are more likely to buy new products, get vaccine shots, and follow regular positive actions like recycling and driving carefully.

"This surprising and novel discovery expands attitude theory by demonstrating that an attitude is not simply a function of an object's properties, but it is also a function of the properties of the individual who evaluates the object," researchers concluded. "Overall, the present research provides clear support for the dispositional attitude as a meaningful construct that has important implications for attitude theory and research."

The findings are published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.