Anger, Emotion or Physiological Response

Anger, Emotion or Physiological Response

Many of the acknowledged experts in the field of Anger Management, that is, the people who have published books on the subject, refer to anger as an emotion, and I suppose they have done that in order to keep it all very simple. Well, remember what Einstein said about simplicity – “Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler”. In this regards one should never eliminate essential factors from an equation, especially if your only concern is to dumb it all down to make it easier for ‘ordinary’ people to understand. The danger there is that it all really will become dumb, and that these ordinary people will end up being misinformed.

If anger is an emotion, then it is a very unique emotion. It comes with its own unique set of physiological symptoms: Unconscious tensing of muscles, especially in the face and neck. Teeth grinding, breathing rate increases dramatically, face turns red and veins start to become visible due to an increase in blood pressure, face turns pale as blood is channeled to muscle groups (fight response), feeling hot or cold, shaking in the hands, goose-bumps, heart rate increases, adrenaline is released into your system creating a surge of power.

Oh, anger is not the only physiological response we know of. We also have crying. We have laughter. We have sexual arousal. And no one calls any of these things “emotions”. They may involve some emotional component, but not necessarily. Physiological responses can be very complex, or really very basically simple.

And that brings us back to anger as the manifestation of a physiological response. How could we ever say such a thing is emotional? Well, yes, in some cases people do take some original emotional trigger, for instance, take the case of a person whose feelings are hurt when a colleague levels what seems like unfair criticism upon his work. Actually, the basic eemotion here would best be described as ‘despondent’. It only becomes anger when it is conjoined to the above mentioned physiological responses, and what would do that? Well, in nature and throughout the animal kingdom this form of physiological response is connected to the fight or flight reaction, that is, when an animal senses that his survival is endangered, it will almost instantaneously trigger a physiological response that looks a lot like anger. Sneak up on a sleeping cat and suddenly scream and clap your hands – there! that is the fight or flight response. Now, is the cat having an emotion, or simply a physiological response to what it senses as an imminent danger? Keep in mind how instantaneous this response was. It can happen that quickly in human beings also (drop a knife in the kitchen when you are in your bare feet, and before the knife hits the floor you will already be in full adrenaline rush). Clearly we have no emotional component here. It’s only a physiological reaction to what is perceived as a dangerous stimulus.

Well, back to the person in our example, the despondent individual who felt insulted by a co-worker. Well, it does seem odd, doesn’t it, that he would unleash this life or death survival response over a few mere words? His life and survival are clearly not threatened. The only explanation is that he somehow had to exaggerate what happened and somehow made himself imagine that a few un-carefully chosen words from a colleague were somehow life-threatening. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But the more modern therapy approaches to Anger Management make just that assumption, that in almost every case where the fight and flight reaction surges up in a social context, what we would call an angry episode, it was in situations where there was no threat of imminent danger; that, simply put, the angry person misinterpreted or greatly exaggerated the meaning of the actual events.


Well, chronically angry people, once one finds out what they are thinking, well, it really is the case that they are thinking, absurdly and inaccurately – ridiculously, to put it frankly. And the new therapies are taking that into account. Angry people are encouraged to go back in their minds and determine at what points their thinking became absurd and stopped reflecting actual Reality. And then they are encouraged to stop thinking that way. And, yes, sometimes what makes these angry people delusional in their thinking does have a strong emotional component. For instance, some Man really loves his girlfriend, and a stranger at a party tips his hat to her. Well, he begins to think ‘What if she left me for this new guy who seems more good looking than I am, richer than I am, smoother and smarter and more debonair than I am’. So now we have a threat to his love (‘I would ‘die’ without my girlfriend’) mingled with envy and jealousy. Suddenly he snaps – is he just going to stand by while this stranger ruins his life!? There, at that moment his over-excited imagination conjures up what seems like an existential threat to his very survival, and he blows up in anger and makes a big fool of himself. So, yes, there was an emotional component involved in the formation of this angry episode, but the question then becomes, well, why on earth would we, in the Anger Management Community, take such emotions seriously? We see what damage they do. Our emphasis needs to be focused on having people perceive their situations rationally and realistically. Codling the emotions that got them into trouble in the first place seems to be taking us in the wrong direction from where we really want to go.

So, have we dispelled the notion that anger is some big hairy ‘emotion’ and decided that anger, as manifesting in almost every social context, is the result of the conjunction of absurd, exaggerated or delusional thinking with the physiological response associated with immanent danger. Now, yes, okay, that was not very simple, but as Einstein said, past a certain point simple just becomes stupid.