I found a website about anger that immediately caught my attention. I don’t understand why my husband disapproves of me blogging about Anger. He says it’s too negative and will rub off on me. Do you know Anger is one of the most primitive emotions we experience – animals are equipped with the same basic neural circuitry. It operates from mild frustration to absolute fury, and the intensity with which we feel anger and how we act on it is very personal. Take me, for example. Right now, I can be laughing and joking around then something triggered me from what knows what. The fury inside me lashed out to the point of attacking my husband at one point for no apparent reason because all I knew was something was said, and my defense mechanism reacted then. Parts, aka multiple identities, created inside my mind getting amped up. My anger is the flash of fire that sparks in my brain when I feel shortchanged. Have you ever dealt with a lazy work colleague that has landed you a thankless task? Or maybe you have been confronted with a deep, hurtful betrayal by someone you love. How do you handle it? I bet you bottled up everything inside you, put off a brave face, and be nonchalant. It’s okay. Just point me in the right direction, and I’ll bitch slap the jerk for you. I get to release some steam, and then if your smile is an approval or is it to beat me up later. In my defense, anger can affect our mental well-being, and it doesn’t sit well with me that you can’t or won’t voice it out.
The Book of Science stated that this is beginning to provide new explanations about the ways that personality, age, gender, and life experiences shape the way we feel this emotion. Great, I’m looking for answers to why my husband rarely gets angry or how he can contain everything inside. He’s not normal. Scientists believe that the capacity for anger has been hardwired into the brain over millions of years of evolution. It forms part of our instinct to fight off threats, compete for resources, and to enforce social norms. Anger is rooted in the brain’s reward circuit. We are constantly – often subconsciously – weighing up what we expect to happen in any situation. When there is a mismatch between what we’ve learned to expect and the hand we’re dealt, our brain’s reward circuit sounds the alarm, and activity is triggered in a small almond-shaped region called the amygdala.
Scientists believe that the capacity for anger has been hardwired into the brain over millions of years of evolution. It forms part of our instinct to fight off threats, compete for resources, and to enforce social norms. Anger is rooted in the brain’s reward circuit. We are constantly – often subconsciously – weighing up what we expect to happen in any situation. When there is a mismatch between what we’ve learned to expect and the hand we’re dealt, our brain’s reward circuit sounds the alarm, and activity is triggered in a small almond-shaped region called the amygdala.
Anger can trigger the body’s fight or flight response, causing the adrenal glands to flood with stress hormones, such as adrenaline and testosterone, preparing us for physical aggression. But whether we end up swearing, scowling, or even punching someone depends on a second brain area, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for decision-making and reasoning. This puts our anger in context, reminds us to behave in socially acceptable ways, and for most of us, most of the time keeps our primal instincts in check.
Feeling anger can alter the way we view risks. Studies have shown that it can make us more impulsive and underestimate the chances of bad outcomes. In one study, volunteers who were made to feel angry estimated the chances of suffering heart disease as being lower and said they were more likely to receive a pay raise when compared with volunteers who had been prompted to feel fearful. Depending on the context, anger can make us brave or reckless.
Anger also influences group dynamics. When we feel angry, we tend to think more negatively and in a more prejudiced way about outsiders, becoming more likely to blame negative traits on a person’s nature rather than their circumstances. Angry people tend to seek someone to blame, research shows. This potentially makes an angry person feel even more enraged with the offending person or group, sometimes perpetuating a spiral of irrational rage. Anger has been viewed somewhat negatively over the course of history. In ancient Rome, Seneca pronounced anger “worthless even for war,” while wrath made it onto the list of deadly sins. But science suggests there could be some benefits for the angry individual, if not for society at large.
Men are, on average, more outwardly aggressive than women, so it might be assumed that they are also angrier. But this doesn’t appear to be the case. Research has consistently found that women experience anger as frequently and intensely as men. Men who feel angry are more likely to display aggression, although this does not mean that women are not motivated by rage as frequently. Women were as angry and acted on their anger as often as men. The main difference they identified was that men felt less effective when forced to contain their anger, while women seemed better at controlling immediate, impulsive responses to anger.
