Anger is a strong emotion of displeasure caused by some ...



Anger is a strong emotion of displeasure caused by some type of grievance that is either real or perceived to be real by a person. The cognitive behavior theory attributes anger to several factors such as past experiences, behavior learned from others, genetic predispositions, and a lack of problem-solving ability. To put it more simply, anger is caused by a combination of two factors: an irrational perception of reality (“It has to be done my way”) and a low frustration point (“It’s my way or no way”). Anger is an internal reaction that is perceived to have an external cause. Angry people almost always blame their reactions on some person or some event, but rarely do they realize that the reason they are angry is because of their irrational perception of the world. Angry people have a certain perception and expectation of the world that they live in and when that reality does not meet their expectation of it, then they become angry.

It is important to understand that not all anger is unhealthy. Anger is one of our most primitive defense mechanisms that protects and motivates us from being dominated or manipulated by others. It gives us the added strength, courage, and motivation needed to combat injustice done against us or to others that we love. However, if anger is left uncontrolled and free to take over the mind and body at any time, then anger becomes destructive.

Why We Need to Control Anger

Just like a person who is under the control of a street drug—-a person under the influence of anger cannot rationalize, comprehend, or make good decisions because anger distorts logical reasoning into blind emotion. You become unable to think clearly and your emotions take control of your actions. Physiologically speaking, anger enacts the fight or flight response in our brain, which increases our blood pressure and releases adrenaline into our bloodstream, thereby increasing our strength and pain threshold. Anger makes us think of only two things: (1) Defend, or (2) Attack. Neither of these options facilitates a good negotiation.

Internal Sources of Anger

Our internal sources of anger come from our irrational perceptions of reality. Psychologists have identified four types of thinking that contribute to anger.

1. Emotional reasoning. People who reason emotionally misinterpret normal events and things that other people say as being directly threatening to their needs and goals. People who use emotional reasoning tend to become irritated at something innocent that other people tell them because they perceive it as an attack on themselves. Emotional reasoning can lead to dysfunctional anger in the long run.

2. Low frustration tolerance. All of us at some point have experienced a time where our tolerance for frustration was low. Often stress-related anxiety lowers our tolerance for frustration and we begin to perceive normal things as threats to our well-being or threats to our ego.

3. Unreasonable expectations. When people make demands, they see things as how they should be and not as they really are. This lowers their frustration tolerance because people who have unreasonable expectations expect others to act a certain way, or for uncontrollable events to behave in a predictable manner. When these things do not go their way, then anger, frustration, and eventually depression set in.

4. People-rating. People-rating is an anger-causing type of thinking where the person applies a derogatory label on someone else. By rating someone as a “bitch” or a “bastard,” it dehumanizes them and makes it easier for them to become angry at the person.

External Sources Of Anger

There are a hundreds of internal and external events that can make us angry, but given the parameters of a negotiating situation, we can narrow these factors down to four general events.

1. The person makes personal attacks against us. The other side attacks you along with the problem in the form of verbal abuse.

2. The person attacks our ideas. The other side chops down our ideas, opinions, and options.

3. The person threatens our needs. The person threatens to take away a basic need of ours if they do not get their way i.e. “I’ll make sure you’ll never work in this city again.”

4. We get frustrated. Our tolerance level for getting things done might be low or affected by any number of environmental factors in our lives.

Factors That Lower Our Frustration Tolerance

1. Stress / Anxiety. When our stress-level increases, our tolerance for frustration decreases. This is why there are so many domestic disputes and divorces over financial problems.

2. Pain. Physical and emotional pain lowers our frustration tolerance. This is because we are so focused on taking care of our survival needs, that we do not have time for anything or anyone else.

3. Drugs / Alcohol. Drugs and alcohol affect how our brain processes information and can make a person more irritable or bring forward repressed emotions or memories that can trigger anger.

4. Recent irritations. Recent irritations can also be called “having a bad day.” It’s the little irritations that add up during the course of the day that lower our tolerance for frustration. Recent irritations can be: stepping in a puddle, spilling coffee on your shirt, being late for work, being stuck in a traffic jam, having a flat tire.

Recognizing the Physiological Signs of Anger

By recognizing the physiological signs of anger, we can attune ourselves to know when it is time to take measures to make sure that our level of anger does not get out of control. Here are some symptoms of anger:

1. Unconscious tensing of muscles, especially in the face and neck.

2. Teeth grinding

3. Breathing rate increases dramatically

4. Face turns red and veins start to become visible due to an increase in blood pressure

5. Face turns pale

6. Sweating

7. Feeling hot or cold

8. Shaking in the hands

9. Goosebumps

10. Heart rate increases

11. Adrenaline is released into your system creating a surge of power.

Am I Right to be Angry?

Damn right you are. You have your own perception and expectation of the world that you live in and when the reality that you live in fails to meet your expectations, then yes you have the right to be angry. Afterall, if everyone thought alike, then the world would be a pretty dull place to live. You are going to run into situations that you don’t enjoy. You are going to run into people who don’t respect your views and ideas. The feeling of anger is totally justified according to your beliefs and so don’t repress or deny those feelings.

Having to right to feel angry does not mean that you have the right to lash out in anger by attacking the other person. You can’t change the views of other people to conform to your own because, like you, they have their own right to uphold their view of the world. The best thing you can do is recognize your anger and focus it on the problem instead of your counterpart.

Key Points

Being angry or frustrated is just like being under the influence of a drug. It prevents you from rationalizing and thinking logically.

Anger is caused by a combination of an irrational perception of reality and a low frustration point.

Anger is a natural response and you have every right to be angry, but you must learn to keep that anger in check during a negotiation because once you react in any negotiation, then you lose the agreement.

What Is Anger?

Everyone has been angry and knows what anger is. Anger can vary widely (from mild irritation to intense fury) and can be sparked by a variety of things (specific people, events, memories, or personal problems). Anger is a natural and potentially productive emotion. However, anger can get out of control and become destructive and problematic.

So why do we get angry? People get angry when their expectations are not met -- whether those expectations are about the future, about themselves, or about others. When our expectations are unmet, we revert to illusions of control, "unrealistically expecting all people to behave and all situations to turn out as we think they should." Anger over these unmet expectations often leads us to blame others and shift aggression towards them.

Gary Ginter, a psychologist who specializes in anger management explains that there are several sources of anger: physiological, cognitive, and behavioral. Physiological anger is natural anger. In certain threatening situations, for instance when we are attacked physically, our bodies respond by making us physically angry. Cognitive sources of anger are based on how we perceive things. These perceptions may be accurate...a situation may, indeed, be threatening, or they may not be. Sometimes we will perceive a threat, even though the external situation is not actually as dangerous as we think it is. In other words, there may be no real reason for anger, but our personal biases and emotions take over, leading to aggression. Finally, behavioral sources of anger come from the environment we create for ourselves. Chronically angry people create an atmosphere in which others are aggressive in return, creating a cycle of anger.

Expressing Anger

Anger is a natural response to certain threats. As a result, aggression is sometimes the appropriate response to anger, as it allows us to defend ourselves. Therefore, a certain amount of anger is necessary. In addition, anger can be useful in expressing how we feel to others. However, we cannot get angry with everyone and everything we encounter. As a result, we must learn to express our anger appropriately.

There are three main approaches to expressing anger -- expression, suppression, and calming. Expression involves conveying your feelings in an assertive, but not aggressive, manner. This is the best way to handle your anger. However, you must make sure that you are respectful of others and are not being overly demanding or pushy, as this will likely only produce aggression in return.

Anger can also be repressed and redirected. Essentially, you want to stop thinking about the source of your anger and focus on something else that can be approached constructively. However, you must be careful when repressing angry feelings. Repressing anger with no constructive outlet can be dangerous and damaging, both physically and mentally. On the other hand, the old idea that you should simply "vent" or "let it all out" is discouraged by conflict experts, who claim that doing so is actually counterproductive, "an exercise in rehearsing the very attributions that arouse anger in the first place."

Anger Management

Uzma Mazhar 

Azfar Malik. M.D

Anger affects us negatively at all four levels of our being... the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels. It is also cited as the main cause of stress and stress-related illnesses.  Hostility and anger are highly co-related with coronary heart disease and other physical and behavioral stress problems. Some health problems that are affected by anger are: headaches, muscular tension (neck, shoulders, back), gastro-intestinal disorders (ulcers, colitis), skin disorders (rashes, itching), circulatory disorders (high blood pressure, coronary artery disease) and respiratory disorders (asthma, breath-holding in children).

In addition to the somatic manifestations of anger there is a broad spectrum of emotional problems that result from suppressing anger. These can extend from episodes of impaired judgment resulting in harmful consequences, to depression to suicide. Anger influences our thinking and our actions.

 The English language uses some interesting phrases that show the connection between anger and the physical body.  Expressions of disappointment, frustration, being let down are also indicators of anger, although they are often not recognized as such.

blowing my top off

blinding rage

splitting headache

 ---- walked all over me

beaten to a pulp

itching to get my hands on ----

my blood boils when ----

lashing out etc;.

Anger is mostly a symptom of Depression, people who are clinically  depressed have increased outbursts of anger, or other variance of anger, like expressing themselves in hate or with hostility. 

Anger can also be an attempt to control others to meet your needs, and is often a result of frustration when you do not get what you want.

Anger in children and adolescents, is associated with problems of impulsivity control, this symptom is seen in kids with ADHD ( Attention Deficit Disorder)

In adults and adolescents who suffer from OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), anger is a predominant symptom, specially when the patient is not able to rationalize their rituals.  There are other rare psychiatric conditions which present with anger as their initial symptom, like patients in the manic phase of their illness ( Manic Depressive Illness), Impulse Control Disorders; and other forms of Organic Brain Disorders, specially caused by various traumatic injuries: ie:  Strokes, Central Nervous System infections, and Mental Retardation.

Anger is expressed either directly through loud screaming and yelling or "lashing out," or indirectly through passive-aggressive behaviors. Some express anger by 'displacing' it.... ie: taking it out on something or someone other than the one they are angry at, kicking doors, blaming their spouse or children. The more serious cases may result in domestic violence, in physical abuse of spouse or children.   Passive-aggressive ways of expressing anger are generally covert and not very obvious. Some of the methods of passive-aggressive anger are: acting belligerent, pouting, 'silent treatment' or being unavailable when needed. Both styles of expression of anger have serious negative effects on one's health and relationships.

Anger in itself is neither good nor bad... the manner in which it is expressed is what makes it a problem.  There are some situations which rightfully provoke anger, and should if we are human beings... abuse of children is one of them.  However, this still does not justify violence or aggression against the perpetrator.  

The underlying motivator in anger is usually fear. Fear stemming from a feeling of lack of control, feeling minimized or belittled by others. Low self-esteem and a sense of personal worthlessness contribute to the fear of loss of control.

How to Manage Your Anger.

 

1         Recognize that you are angry.

2         Identify the source of anger in yourself.

3         Do a reality-check.

4         Take appropriate action.

Management of  Anger depends on the underlying cause, and treatment of the illness.  Understand your pattern of anger, what provokes you and how you respond to it. Everyone has different 'triggers' that set them off. Find out what it is about you that sets you off. Anger of which we are aware is much less harmful and damaging. Understand what you do before you explode, follow the sequence of events and thoughts to the underlying dynamics of your own thought patterns that lead to the inappropriate expression of anger. Be aware of your own thoughts and how they are connected to your actions.

If you set expectations for yourself and others by saying  that people or things "should" be something other than what they are, then you can get  more frustrated and angered in your life. These 'shoulds and musts' are self-destructive and potentially harmful to your relationship with others.

The appropriate action is usually about yourself, and how you  handle the situation, not about how you  make the other change or adapt to you.  Right or wrong, everyone has to decide for themselves how to live their life, we cannot make decisions for the other person. Nor can we force the other to live their life according to what we think is right.  Once we understand this and learn to respect each other based on this premise, life does become easier.  ;-)

      

As we have discussed earlier, various treatments are effective for different underlying causes of anger, in the more severe cases medications are used as an adjunct form of therapy.  Many SSRI's ( Serotenergic antidepressants like Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Celexa), help reduce anger episodes in patients who do not have  any clinical psychiatric disorders.

Social Rage

The same issues that can arouse anger in individuals can also arouse anger in large groups. This concept of social rage, or social anger, is an important one for understanding conflict. Social rage is similar to personal rage, but it is generated by social issues and expressed by social groups. Examples of social rage are abundant: anger at immigrants over unemployment, hate crimes, homophobia, etc. Many of the factors at play in personal rage are also important in social rage, including humiliation and a sense of violation of expectations.

When Is Anger Good?

Anger can serve very positive functions when expressed properly. Studies continue to show that anger can have beneficial effects on individuals' health, their relationships and their work. Socially, very positive changes can come from anger -- for instance, the civil rights movement of the 1960s or the women's suffrage movement in the early 20th century. On an individual level, scientists have shown angry episodes actually strengthen personal relationships more than half of the time.

Social scientists agree that anger can be beneficial when it is expressed constructively. One way to ensure this is through the use of feedback loops. Constructive anger expression involves both parties, not just the angry person. Ideally, the angry person expresses his or her anger and the target has a chance to respond. Oftentimes, simple expression helps to ease the situation, particularly if the anger is justified. Remember that this is not simply an opportunity for someone to "vent." It must be approached with the attitude of solving a problem.

Dealing with Anger/Anger Management

As discussed, anger is not necessarily bad. Anger becomes problematic when it is expressed in improper or damaging ways. However, there are many things that can be done to help promote the constructive use of angry feelings.

What Individuals Can Do:

The first step in dealing with anger is to become aware of it. Learn how anger affects you, how you deal with it, and what triggers it in you. There are many ways to handle anger once you learn to recognize it and catch it early on. The American Psychological Association suggests the following:[7]

Relaxation -- As simple as it sounds, basic relaxation exercises can be powerful tools in overcoming one's anger. Among these simple techniques are deep breathing; slowly repeating a relaxing phrase, such as "relax" or "take it easy"; using peaceful imagery to imagine a relaxing situation; and relaxing exercise, like yoga or tai-chi.

Cognitive Restructuring -- Cognitive restructuring is basically changing the way you think about things. This involves thinking more positively about a situation; avoiding terms like "always" and "never," which can be used to justify your anger; using logic on yourself to prevent irrational behavior; and learning to change your approach -- requesting rather than demanding, for example.

Problem Solving -- Not all anger is inappropriate. When there is a very real root to your anger, approaching the situation from the perspective of a problem solver can help to diffuse your strong feelings. Make a plan for how you can fix the situation and approach it with good intentions.

Better Communication -- Angry people tend to jump to conclusions and overreact. By slowing down and thinking about what you say, this problem can be avoided. Also, make sure you understand what other people are saying before responding to them. Listen to the reasons for others' anger and try not to be overly critical. Listening is as important to communication as speaking is.

Using Humor -- By refusing to take yourself too seriously, you can defuse your anger. Try using humorous imagery to lighten your mood or to make fun of yourself. However, you should avoid using sarcastic and harsh humor, which is simply another expression of anger. You should also avoid simply "laughing off" your problems, which ignores the issue at hand. Instead use humor to approach the problem more constructively.

Change Your Environment -- Oftentimes our environment contributes to our anger by causing irritation and fury. Make a point to take a break. Schedule personal time. When stress becomes too intense, simply get away for 15 minutes to regroup and refresh.

Anger - The Common Source of Personality Disorders

Anger is a compounded phenomenon. It has dispositional properties, expressive and motivational components, situational and individual variations, cognitive and excitatory interdependent manifestations and psychophysiological (especially neuroendocrine) aspects. From the psychobiological point of view, it probably had its survival utility in early evolution, but it seems to have lost a lot of it in modern societies. Actually, in most cases it is counterproductive, even dangerous. Dysfunctional anger is known to have pathogenic effects (mostly cardiovascular).

Most personality disordered people are prone to be angry. Their anger is always sudden, raging, frightening and without an apparent provocation by an outside agent. It would seem that people suffering from personality disorders are in a CONSTANT state of anger, which is effectively suppressed most of the time. It manifests itself only when the person's defenses are down, incapacitated, or adversely affected by circumstances, inner or external. We have pointed at the psychodynamic source of this permanent, bottled-up anger, elsewhere in this book. In a nutshell, the patient was, usually, unable to express anger and direct it at "forbidden" targets in his early, formative years (his parents, in most cases). The anger, however, was a justified reaction to abuses and mistreatment. The patient was, therefore, left to nurture a sense of profound injustice and frustrated rage. Healthy people experience anger, but as a transitory state. This is what sets the personality disordered apart: their anger is always acute, permanently present, often suppressed or repressed. Healthy anger has an external inducing agent (a reason). It is directed at this agent (coherence).

Pathological anger is neither coherent, not externally induced. It emanates from the inside and it is diffuse, directed at the "world" and at "injustice" in general. The patient does identify the IMMEDIATE cause of the anger. Still, upon closer scrutiny, the cause is likely to be found lacking and the anger excessive, disproportionate, incoherent. To refine the point: it might be more accurate to say that the personality disordered is expressing (and experiencing) TWO layers of anger, simultaneously and always. The first layer, the superficial anger, is indeed directed at an identified target, the alleged cause of the eruption. The second layer, however, is anger directed at himself. The patient is angry at himself for being unable to vent off normal anger, normally. He feels like a miscreant. He hates himself. This second layer of anger also comprises strong and easily identifiable elements of frustration, irritation and annoyance.

While normal anger is connected to some action regarding its source (or to the planning or contemplation of such action) – pathological anger is mostly directed at oneself or even lacks direction altogether. The personality disordered are afraid to show that they are angry to meaningful others because they are afraid to lose them. The Borderline Personality Disordered is terrified of being abandoned, the narcissist (NPD) needs his Narcissistic Supply Sources, the Paranoid – his persecutors and so on. These people prefer to direct their anger at people who are meaningless to them, people whose withdrawal will not constitute a threat to their precariously balanced personality. They yell at a waitress, berate a taxi driver, or explode at an underling. Alternatively, they sulk, feel anhedonic or pathologically bored, drink or do drugs – all forms of self-directed aggression. From time to time, no longer able to pretend and to suppress, they have it out with the real source of their anger. They rage and, generally, behave like lunatics. They shout incoherently, make absurd accusations, distort facts, pronounce allegations and suspicions. These episodes are followed by periods of saccharine sentimentality and excessive flattering and submissiveness towards the victim of the latest rage attack. Driven by the mortal fear of being abandoned or ignored, the personality disordered debases and demeans himself to the point of provoking repulsion in the beholder. These pendulum-like emotional swings make life with the personality disordered difficult.

Anger in healthy persons is diminished through action. It is an aversive, unpleasant emotion. It is intended to generate action in order to eradicate this uncomfortable sensation. It is coupled with physiological arousal. But it is not clear whether action diminishes anger or anger is used up in action. Similarly, it is not clear whether the consciousness of anger is dependent on a stream of cognition expressed in words? Do we become angry because we say that we are angry (=we identify the anger and capture it) – or do we say that we are angry because we are angry to start with?

Anger is induced by numerous factors. It is almost a universal reaction. Any threat to one's welfare (physical, emotional, social, financial, or mental) is met with anger. But so are threats to one's affiliates, nearest, dearest, nation, favorite football club, pet and so on. The territory of anger is enlarged to include not only the person – but all his real and perceived environment, human and non-human. This does not sound like a very adaptative strategy. Threats are not the only situations to be met with anger. Anger is the reaction to injustice (perceived or real), to disagreements, to inconvenience. But the two main sources of anger are threat (a disagreement is potentially threatening) and injustice (inconvenience is injustice inflicted on the angry person by the world).

These are also the two sources of personality disorders. The personality disordered is moulded by recurrent and frequent injustice and he is constantly threatened both by his internal and by his external universes. No wonder that there is a close affinity between the personality disordered and the acutely angry person.

And, as opposed to common opinion, the angry person becomes angry whether he believes that what was done to him was deliberate or not. If we lose a precious manuscript, even unintentionally, we are bound to become angry at ourselves. If his home is devastated by an earthquake – the owner will surely rage, though no conscious, deliberating mind was at work. When we perceive an injustice in the distribution of wealth or love – we become angry because of moral reasoning, whether the injustice was deliberate or not. We retaliate and we punish as a result of our ability to morally reason and to get even. Sometimes even moral reasoning is lacking, as in when we simply wish to alleviate a diffuse anger.

What the personality disordered does is: he suppresses the anger, but he has no effective mechanisms of redirecting it in order to correct the inducing conditions. His hostile expressions are not constructive – they are destructive because they are diffuse, excessive and, therefore, unclear. He does not lash out at people in order to restore his lost self-esteem, his prestige, his sense of power and control over his life, to recover emotionally, or to restore his well being. He rages because he cannot help it and is in a self-destructive and self-loathing mode. His anger does not contain a signal, which could alter his environment in general and the behavior of those around him, in particular. His anger is primitive, maladaptive, pent up.

Anger is a primitive, limbic emotion. Its excitatory components and patterns are shared with sexual excitation and with fear. It is cognition that guides our behavior, aimed at avoiding harm and aversion or at minimizing them. Our cognition is in charge of attaining certain kinds of mental gratification. An analysis of future values of the relief-gratification versus repercussions (reward to risk) ratio – can be obtained only through cognitive tools. Anger is provoked by aversive treatment, deliberately or unintentionally inflicted. Such treatment must violate either prevailing conventions regarding social interactions or some otherwise deeply ingrained sense of what is fair and what is just. The judgement of fairness or justice (namely, the appraisal of the extent of compliance with conventions of social exchange) – is also cognitive.

The angry person and the personality disordered both suffer from a cognitive deficit. They are unable to conceptualize, to design effective strategies and to execute them. They dedicate all their attention to the immediate and ignore the future consequences of their actions. In other words, their attention and information processing faculties are distorted, skewed in favor of the here and now, biased on both the intake and the output. Time is "relativistically dilated" – the present feels more protracted, "longer" than any future. Immediate facts and actions are judged more relevant and weighted more heavily than any remote aversive conditions. Anger impairs cognition.

The angry person is a worried person. The personality disordered is also excessively preoccupied with himself. Worry and anger are the cornerstones of the edifice of anxiety. This is where it all converges: people become angry because they are excessively concerned with bad things which might happen to them. Anger is a result of anxiety (or, when the anger is not acute, of fear).

The striking similarity between anger and personality disorders is the deterioration of the faculty of empathy. Angry people cannot empathize. Actually, "counter-empathy" develops in a state of acute anger. All mitigating circumstances related to the source of the anger – are taken as meaning to devalue and belittle the suffering of the angry person. His anger thus increases the more mitigating circumstances are brought to his attention. Judgment is altered by anger. Later provocative acts are judged to be more serious – just by "virtue" of their chronological position. All this is very typical of the personality disordered. An impairment of the empathic sensitivities is a prime symptom in many of them (in the Narcissistic, Antisocial, Schizoid and Schizotypal Personality Disordered, to mention but four).

Moreover, the aforementioned impairment of judgement (=impairment of the proper functioning of the mechanism of risk assessment) appears in both acute anger and in many personality disorders. The illusion of omnipotence (power) and invulnerability, the partiality of judgement – are typical of both states. Acute anger (rage attacks in personality disorders) is always incommensurate with the magnitude of the source of the emotion and is fuelled by extraneous experiences. An acutely angry person usually reacts to an ACCUMULATION, an amalgamation of aversive experiences, all enhancing each other in vicious feedback loops, many of them not directly related to the cause of the specific anger episode. The angry person may be reacting to stress, agitation, disturbance, drugs, violence or aggression witnessed by him, to social or to national conflict, to elation and even to sexual excitation. The same is true of the personality disordered. His inner world is fraught with unpleasant, ego-dystonic, discomfiting, unsettling, worrisome experiences. His external environment – influenced and moulded by his distorted personality – is also transformed into a source of aversive, repulsive, or plainly unpleasant experiences. The personality disordered explodes in rage – because he implodes AND reacts to outside stimuli, simultaneously. Because he is a slave to magical thinking and, therefore, regards himself as omnipotent, omniscient and protected from the consequences of his own acts (immune) – the personality disordered often acts in a self-destructive and self-defeating manner. The similarities are so numerous and so striking that it seems safe to say that the personality disordered is in a constant state of acute anger.

Finally, acutely angry people perceive anger to have been the result of intentional (or circumstantial) provocation with a hostile purpose (by the target of their anger). Their targets, on the other hand, invariably regard them as incoherent people, acting arbitrarily, in an unjustified manner.

Replace the words "acutely angry" with the words "personality disordered" and the sentence would still remain largely valid.

Rage, in psychiatry, is a mental state that is one extreme of the intensity spectrum of anger. When a person experiences rage it usually lasts until a threat is removed or the person under rage is maimed/injured or killed. The other end of the spectrum is annoyance.

Types

According to psychologists, rage is a behavior that every person exhibits in some form. Rage is often used to denote hostile/affective/reactive aggression (as distinct from predatory/instrumental/proactive aggression). It denotes aggression where there is anger present, that is motivated by causing harm to others, and that is characterized by impulsive thinking and a lack of planning. This is a behavioral side that many would not like others to see, but does often persist in extreme situations. Some psychologists, such as Bushman and Anderson, argue that the hostile/predatory dichotomy that is commonly employed in psychology fails to define rage fully, since it is possible for anger to motivate aggression, provoking vengeful behavior, without incorporating the impulsive thinking that is characteristic of rage. They point to individuals or groups such as the gunman in the Virginia Tech Massacre or Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of the Columbine High School massacre, and suicide bombers, all of whom clearly experienced intense anger and hate, but whose planning (sometimes over periods of years), forethought, and lack of impulsive behavior is readily observable.

Expression of rage can be very intense, often distinguished by distorted facial expressions and by threat (or execution) of physical attack. “Rage is a physiologically based affective reaction to experiencing high levels of pain or displeasure (Parens, 1991, p. 89).” Psychologists have seen rage as caused by being more of an attack on one’s self than of others. This leads to rage being more intense, less focused and longer lasting. This same idea suggests rage is a narcissistic response to one’s past injuries (Menninger, W. 2007). How does one tell the difference between rage and normal amounts of anger? Anger is explained by current dissatisfaction in one’s life. This amount of anger or frustration is common. Rage, however, is caused from built up anger from past traumas. These accumulated angry dispositions are locked in our mind and bodies (King, R. 2007). One can mask rage by appearing overly dominant, or by being depressed.

Cultivation theory

There has recently been a correlation between rage and the Cultivation Theory by George Gerbner. Cultivation Theory places blame on outside influences, such as, violent television programs and exposure to violent video games. There are specific elements that aid with rage being expressed. “This is seen when an individual perceives a narcissistic injury that is experienced as being profoundly unfair; the individual has no hope for achieving a reasonable resolution of the injury; the individual reaches the decision that the injury cannot be tolerated further and must be responded to with action; the individual has access to weapons to enhance the capacity and potency to respond; and the individual feels a sufficient sense of potency and/or disregard of the consequences to initiate violence (Menninger, W. 2007).”

When thinking of rage, the first thing that comes to mind is road rage and the various acts that stem from road rage. Most people who have sat behind a wheel have experienced some form of road rage; whether it be cursing at someone who has cut you off in traffic or giving the middle finger when someone steals your parking spot, most people have succumb to rage while in the car. Giving the finger when a driver cuts you off in traffic may be a normal reaction. However, when that normal reaction escalates, psychologists may call it intermittent explosive disorder (IED). A study has found that at least one in twenty people suffer from this disorder. IED is an aggressive overreaction to everyday stress, and may be a cause to severe road rage (Kashef, 2006). It is distinguished from normal anger by its severity, its controllability, its frequency and its triggers. These anger attacks can harm your health and social life, as well as many people around you. Recent studies done prove that there is more rage experienced than most expect.

IED is more explosive than rage and even more common for people to experience than rage. There was a study done in Baltimore, MD which found that 11% of people taken for the study qualified for IED. The percentages were constant amongst men and women, and blacks and whites. Those who were younger were more susceptible to IED. People who experienced the greatest risk for IED were those who are less educated. Studies suggest that the reason people experience these behavioral tendencies are because they suffer from abnormal activity of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Although impulsive aggression is generally associated with low serotonin activity, as well as, damage to the prefrontal cortex, which is the center of judgment and self-control. There has been extensive research done in order to change the patterns of these behavioral tendencies, which goes more in depth than people actually realize (Harvard Mental Health Center, 2006).

A major goal for many researches is to identify with individual differences in displaced aggression, where the anger comes from, and why it is transferred onto other individuals (Denison, Miller, and Pederson, 2006). Direct aggression is the retaliation towards the provoking agent, whereas, displaced aggression is anger not provoked by an individual, but transferred to an innocent bystander. When dealing with rage, we have to ask ourselves, what emotional forces cause individuals to express aggression, hostility, anger, hate, or rage evolving into violence. Aggression stems from rage in which aggression focuses on action or behavior as opposed to emotion or effect.

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