Multiple facets of anger : getting mad or restoring justice?

208 Pages·2011·8.91 MB·English

by  Pahlavan

PSYCHOLOGY OF EMOTIONS, MOTIVATIONS AND ACTIONS

M F A :
ULTIPLE ACETS OF NGER
G M R
ETTING AD OR ESTORING
JUSTICE?

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PSYCHOLOGY OF EMOTIONS, MOTIVATIONS
AND ACTIONS

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PSYCHIATRY - THEORY, APPLICATIONS
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PSYCHOLOGY OF EMOTIONS, MOTIVATIONS AND ACTIONS

M F A :
ULTIPLE ACETS OF NGER
G M R
ETTING AD OR ESTORING
JUSTICE?

FARZANEH PAHLAVAN
EDITOR

Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
New York
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Multiple facets of anger : getting mad or restoring justice? / [edited by]
Farzaneh Pahlavan.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-61761-640-2 (eBook)
1. Anger. I. Pahlavan, Farzaneh.
BF575.A5.M85 2010
152.4'7--dc22
2010029778

Published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. † New York
CONTENTS

Introduction i
Chapter 1 Ten Questions About Anger that You May Never Have
Thought to Ask 1
James R. Averill
Chapter 2 Anger: Its Nature and its Relation to Aggression 27
Leonard Berkowitz
Chapter 3 The Neurobiology of RAGE and Anger & Psychiatric Implications
with a Focus on Depression 45
Daniel J. Guerra, Valentina Colonnello and Jaak Panksepp
Chapter 4 The Development and Function of Anger
in Childhood and Adolescence 81
Maria von Salisch and Carolyn Saarni
Chapter 5 Negative affect and social behavior: On the Adaptive functions
of aversive Moods 103
Joseph P. Forgas
Chapter 6 Anger at Work: Why Do We Get Angry and What Can
and Should We Do About It? 119
Tanja Wranik
Chapter 7 High-Level Constructed Social Threats: ―Out of Sight,
Out of Mind‖ 147
Farzaneh Pahlavan
Index 183

INTRODUCTION

This book is an attempt to document the current state of research on anger, and to reflect
the expanding understanding of how anger as an emotion interfaces with other aspects of
psychological functioning, including behavior. It takes into account work by pioneers in this
field as well as efforts by new investigators. All have to deal with the ambiguity and
subjectivity of the construct by being clear about how they conceptualize it. These chapters
provide a representative rather than exhaustive sampling of cutting-edge research and theory
on anger.
It has been about three decades since the publication of Averill‘s book which gave a new
picture of anger through its connection with cognitions (Averill, 1982). The analysis of anger
in Western thought can be traced as far as fourth-century BCE in Greece. Aristotle (384-322
B.C.) proposed the idea that anger is a rational and natural reaction to offense, and hence
closely aligned with reason. In the Rhetoric (1991, p. 1380) he defined anger as ―a belief that
we, or our friends, have been unfairly slighted, which causes in us both painful feelings and a
desire or impulse for revenge.‖ Although, details, including assumptions about the relative
importance of conscious and unconscious influences, have varied over time, this same
division into biologically-unconscious based influences and conscious mental and behavioral
influences on anger has continued to characterize psychologists‘ thought over two millennia.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, while psychoanalysts (e.g. Freud 1920) were
elaborating a psychology of the unconscious, including innate and inherently antisocial sexual
and aggressive drives that blindly seek expression and satisfaction (i.e. the id), behaviorists
(e.g. Watson, 1913) refused to say anything explicit about unconscious processes, treated
conscious experience as epiphenomena, and saw ―the mind‖ in some way as a black box.
Hence, while the psychoanalytic approach dealt exclusively with aggression, and held that
anger was subsumed under aggression and a part of the death drive, behaviorists avoided
analyses of internal processes altogether. In vogue for many years, the Frustration-Aggression
hypothesis followed the Freudian approach in equating anger with aggression. During the
1950s and 1960s, psychologists writing about anger explained it as the mediator of the
relation between frustration and aggression. Distinguishing between the emotion of anger and
its expression in action, the frustration-aggression hypothesis (Dollard, Doob, Miller,
Mowrer, & Sears, 1939) with its extension to anger (Pastore, 1952; Berkowitz, 1962) may be
viewed as a precursor to the cognitive era. However, being primarily behavioristic, the
ii Farzaneh Pahlavan
differentiation of anger from other negative emotions was not of specific interest for
advocates of the frustration-aggression hypothesis, nor were psychological processes related
to the regulation of anger expression. Only the development of the cognitive approach
allowed a clear cut distinction between anger and its behavioral expression (Averill, 1982).
Thus, details changed as dominant metaphors for mind changed, from a hydraulic system
at the beginning of the twentieth century (e.g. Freud, 1920), to the computer system
(Kihlstrom, 1987) passing through the metaphors of a black box or homunculus. The
computer as metaphor enabled the conceptualization of human mind in terms of meta-
cognitions operating under the influence of complex higher-order mental processes, without
any assumption based on innate drives that seek gratification without regard to the constraints
of social reality. The development of the cognitive approach in psychology led to a range of
discoveries about the complex mental processes underlying affect, motivation, and cognition,
including anger and its concomitant perceptual, motivational, decisional, and behavioral
processes.

SO WHAT’S NEW IN THE STUDY OF ANGER?

Averill, as one of the pioneers in the field, raises ten basic questions that are implicit in
decades of research on ―basic‖ or ―controlled‖ processes involving anger, but seldom
confronted so explicitly and elegantly. Averill in his chapter (chapter 1) tries to convince
readers that (1) anger is not a thing in itself; (2) aggression, although a prototypic feature of
anger, is one of its less common forms of expression; (3) social beliefs and rules are principal
organizers of anger; (4) on an abstract level, anger-like emotions are universal because their
social functions are vital to any society, but, on a more specific level, each society has its own
way of fulfilling those functions; (5) the experience of anger is often a post hoc interpretation
of one‘s own behavior; (6) modern men as well as women are often the victims of domestic
violence, typically attributed to anger; (7) anger can, but should not, serve as an excuse for
violence; (8) anger can sometimes facilitate recovery from disease; (9) catharsis is not a
purgation of angry feelings, but learning how to respond creatively to provocation; and,
finally, (10) anger can be conceived of as a transitional social role.
The frustration or thwarting of a goal commitment is still basically and historically
understood as a factor which can lead to various negative emotions, such as anxiety, shame,
guilt, and of course anger, potentially in dynamically significant patterns. Recent conceptions
of aggression, traditionally thought of as a behavioral expression of anger, paint a more
complex picture of the link between the two. Berkowitz (chapter 2) note how complex the
―anger-aggression‖ relationship has become since his first related proposition (Berkowitz,
1962), and modifies this picture even further. Berkowitz defines the anger experience as
largely the sensations of an activated aggression-related motor program and its associated
neural/bodily changes, along with whatever primed ideas come to mind about the instigating
situation. He presents these neural/somatic/cognitive activities as automatic responses to two
kinds of factors: (a) the intense, active negative affect produced by decidedly aversive
occurrences, and/or (b) stimuli (either internal or external) that are associated with decidedly
negative happenings and/or with aggression generally. When intense enough, aggression-
related reactions will be manifested in an impulsive attack on an available target,