Anger

• 1. Introduction

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  Every year, Gallup asks people in more than 140 countries a single blunt question: did you experience anger during a lot of the day yesterday? In 2021-23 percent of adults said yes, up from 18 percent in 2014. The places that reported the most anger were Lebanon, Turkey, Armenia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The calmest were Finland, Mauritius, Estonia, Portugal, and the Netherlands. Anger is that universal, and that measurable. It is the emotion known also as wrath or rage, an intense and uncomfortable response to a perceived provocation, hurt, or threat. Yet for something so common, anger remains strangely misunderstood. The angry person almost always blames the world outside, while psychologists insist that same person has lost the ability to see themselves clearly. Why does anger warp judgment the way it does? Can it ever do good? And why have thinkers from ancient Rome to modern Tibet spent centuries arguing about whether it should be controlled, expressed, or honored?

• 2. The Body In Revolt

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  The rib cage tenses and breathing through the nose becomes faster, deeper, and irregular. This is anger written on the body before a single word is spoken. The face flushes, the nostrils flare, the jaw tenses. The brow muscles move inward and downward, fixing a hard stare on the target. Arms rise, a squared-off stance is adopted, and the body is mobilized for immediate action. Often this brings a subjective sense of strength, self-assurance, and potency that can encourage the impulse to strike out.

  Heart rate and blood pressure climb as the angry body prepares itself. Anger activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, releasing the stress hormones adrenaline and noradrenaline. The catecholamine activation leans more strongly toward norepinephrine than epinephrine. Blood flows to the hands, perspiration increases when the anger is intense, and the whole system shifts toward what some describe as part of the fight or flight response.

  Multiple structures in the brain generate this emotion rather than any single one. When sensory data travels from the sense organs toward the limbic forebrain, the amygdala performs a rapid, minimal evaluation of its emotional significance. Emotion that arises from thoughts or memories is relayed instead from the thalamus to the neocortex. In neuroimaging studies of anger, the most consistently activated region was the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, a region tied to approach motivation and positive affective processes. Some scholars, working from statistical analysis, have suggested the tendency for anger may even be genetic, though distinguishing genetic from environmental factors still demands further research.

• 3. The Liar In The Mind

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  Anger causes a reduction in cognitive ability and in the accurate processing of external stimuli. Under its influence, dangers seem smaller, actions seem less risky, and ventures seem more likely to succeed. Angry people make riskier decisions and less realistic assessments of those risks. In one study, subjects primed to feel angry judged themselves less likely to have heart disease and more likely to receive a pay raise than fearful subjects did.

  A 2005 study captured how this distortion reaches even into memory. Angry subjects recalled the risks of terrorism in the year following the September 11th attacks as low, while fearful and neutral subjects remembered them as higher. Anger does not promote the careful weighing of evidence. Unlike sadness and fear, which push people toward analytical thinking, anger drives the opposite direction.

  Correspondence bias is the strange signature of an angry mind. Angry people blame a person's behavior on their nature rather than their circumstances, lean harder on stereotypes, and pay attention to the superficial instead of the detail. They also place more blame on others for their own misery, which can spiral. The extra blame feeds the anger, and the angrier person assigns yet more blame in turn. Anger even sharpens desire. In a 2010 Dutch study, subjects shown an angry face then shown a random object wanted to possess that object more than subjects who had been primed with fear.

• 4. Three Faces Of Wrath

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  Hasty and sudden anger is connected to the impulse for self-preservation, shared by humans and other animals, and it erupts when a creature feels tormented or trapped. Psychologists recognize it as one of three distinct types. The second, settled and deliberate anger, is a reaction to perceived deliberate harm or unfair treatment. Both of these are episodic. The third, dispositional anger, belongs to character rather than instinct, surfacing as irritability, sullenness, and churlishness.

  Raymond Novaco of the University of California, Irvine, who has published widely on the subject since 1975, divided anger into three modalities: cognitive appraisals, somatic-affective tension and agitation, and behavioral withdrawal and antagonism. The anger management writer William DeFoore offered a homelier image, describing anger as a pressure cooker that can only be suppressed for so long before it erupts.

  Passive anger, aggressive anger, and assertive anger form a simpler trichotomy with their own symptoms. Passive anger hides in the cold shoulder, the fake smile, the silent treatment, false tearfulness, and stockpiled resentments expressed behind people's backs. Aggressive anger shows itself in bullying, vandalism, reckless driving, finger pointing, slammed doors, and explosive rages over minor frustrations. Assertive anger appears in measured blame, temporary punishment, and sternness, like calling out a person with a raised voice and clear disapproval. Ephrem Fernandez went further still, identifying six dimensions of anger expression, mapping its direction, locus, reaction, modality, impulsivity, and objective into profiles like the explosive, the repressive, and the constructive.

• 5. Anger As Power

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  Larissa Tiedens, known for her studies of anger, found that expressing anger raises a person's perceived power and social position. Earlier research by Keating in 1985 had already shown that people with angry facial expressions were seen as powerful and high in status. Tiedens demonstrated that when people compared an angry character with a sad one, they assigned higher social status to the angry character and were inclined to support that person rather than the sad one.

  Negotiation reveals this dynamic in action. Tiedens and colleagues found that anger expressers were perceived as stubborn, dominant, and powerful, and that people gave up more easily to those they saw as powerful rather than soft. Building from these results, Sinaceur and Tiedens found that people conceded more to the angry side. Van Kleef and colleagues then asked whether people yield more to an angry opponent or a happy one, and found participants grew more flexible toward the angry opponent. People read emotion to gauge an opponent's limits, then adjust their demands accordingly.

  The display of anger can be feigned or exaggerated like any emotion. Studies by Hochschild and Sutton showed that a show of anger works as an effective manipulation strategy for shaping attitudes. Some animals make loud sounds, try to look physically larger, bare their teeth, and stare, and the behaviors associated with anger are designed to warn aggressors to stop. Rarely does a physical altercation occur without at least one participant first expressing anger.

• 6. Letting It Out, Holding It In

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  Each instance of anger demands a choice, according to Leland R. Beaumont. A person can respond with hostile action like overt violence, or with hostile inaction like withdrawing or stonewalling, or by starting a dominance contest, harboring resentment, or working to understand and resolve the issue. Raymond Novaco recommends discussing the problems involved and exploring the situations that lead to anger.

  Conventional therapies restructure thoughts and beliefs, often through cognitive behavioral therapy or rational emotive behavior therapy. People with excessive anger frequently act on dysfunctional assumptions and evaluations, and trained professionals can bring those reactions to manageable levels. Treatment is followed by stress inoculation, where clients learn relaxation skills and cognitive controls. The American Psychological Association puts it plainly: logic defeats anger, because anger, even when justified, can quickly become irrational. Taking deep breaths is regarded as the first step to calming down. A newer integrative approach, Fernandez's cognitive behavioral affective therapy from 2010, sequences treatment across three phases: prevention, intervention, and postvention.

  Suppression carries its own dangers. The suppressed anger may find another outlet, surfacing as a physical symptom or growing more extreme. John W. Fiero cites the Los Angeles riots of 1992 as a sudden explosive release of suppressed anger, displaced onto people who had nothing to do with the cause. He points also to the Nazis blaming Jews for the economic ills of Germany as deflection toward scapegoating. There is the case of Francine Hughes, who endured 13 years of domestic abuse before her suppressed anger drove her to kill her abuser husband. Studies link suppressed anger to hypertension, coronary artery disease, cancer, irritable bowel syndrome, eating disorders, depression, and higher rates of suicide. Certain psychiatric medications, including SSRIs like sertraline and antipsychotics like aripiprazole and risperidone, may help control symptoms of anger, hostility, and irritability.

• 7. Madness Or Justice

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  Galen and Seneca both regarded anger as a kind of madness. Ancient Greek philosophers, watching uncontrolled anger toward slaves in their society, generally took a hostile view of it, and they agreed on both the possibility and the value of controlling it. For Seneca, anger was worthless even for war. He believed the disciplined Roman army regularly beat the Germans, who were known for their fury, and he argued that in sporting contests it is a mistake to become angry.

  Aristotle disagreed, ascribing value to anger that arises from perceived injustice because it helps prevent injustice. He noted that the opposite of anger is a kind of insensibility. Seneca offered a practical program for mastering it: remember anger's many faults, avoid hunger and thirst, listen to soothing music, check your speech and impulses, and put yourself in the place of the person who seems to slight you. Galen added that finding a guide and teacher can help, and both men agreed that the work of controlling anger should begin in childhood, though Seneca warned against humiliating or pampering children.

  Medieval and modern thinkers kept the argument alive. Maimonides ruled that one who becomes angry is as though he had worshipped idols, and Thomas Aquinas held that anger with cause is not a sin, since without anger teaching is useless and crimes go unchecked. In the modern era, David Hume argued that lacking anger and hatred is sometimes evidence of weakness and imbecility. Soraya Chemaly called anger a critically useful and positive emotion that warns humans something is wrong, while arguing that women and minorities are not allowed to be angry to the same extent as white men. Rebecca Traister similarly held that holding back anger has impeded the progress of women's rights.

• 8. The Anger Of Gods

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  In the Book of Genesis, Jacob condemned the anger of his sons Simon and Levi: cursed be their anger, for it was fierce, and their wrath, for it was cruel. Judaism treats anger as a negative trait, and the Ethics of the Fathers asks who is strong, answering that it is he who subdues his evil inclination. Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi explained that anger resembles idol worship because the angry person disregards Divine Providence, denying that whatever caused the anger was ultimately ordained from Above.

  Wrath sits among the Seven Deadly Sins in Catholicism, yet the Catechism states that in the passions there is neither good nor evil. Anger becomes the sin of wrath when directed at an innocent person, when unduly long-lasting, or when it desires excessive punishment. Henri J.M. Nouwen offered a more positive view, writing that only by expressing our anger and hatred directly to God do we come to know the fullness of his love and our freedom. Georges Bernanos dramatized this in his novel The Diary of a Country Priest, where a grieving countess admits she hates God, and the priest replies that she is now at last face to face with Him.

  The Dalai Lama, asked whether any anger is acceptable in Buddhism, answered that he does not accept anger of any kind as a virtuous emotion. Buddhism counts anger among the five hindrances and among the three kleshas at the root of samsara, alongside greed and delusion. The Buddha taught that an angry person is ugly and sleeps poorly, destroys his wealth and status, and is avoided by relatives, friends, and colleagues. In Islam, anger is considered to be instigated by Satan, and a verse in the third surah of the Quran instructs people to restrain it. Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, left a line that gathers all of this argument into a single breath: a moment of patience in a moment of anger saves a thousand moments of regret.