Are we bad for getting mad?
Psychologists say it's normal to get angry. We all do it -- and we need to feel anger. It's a basic human emotion, they say.
More and more, though, we see people losing their cool in public. And the kind of outbursts seen at town hall meetings on health care reform, on tennis courts, on the Internet and even during speeches by the president are increasingly a part of everyday life.
"There is very little, if any, social consequence to turning on the flames," says Art Markman, a psychology professor at the University of Texas-Austin, who has written about the anonymity of the Internet making people feel freer to express anger.
There's no official data suggesting Americans are angrier today than in the past. Psychologists and other experts even disagree on whether people really are angrier or just have fewer inhibitions about acting out in public. Some say narcissism and feelings of entitlement, which are reportedly on the rise, make people upset when they don't get what they want. And the culture of open expression -- including TV and radio talk shows that fuel the fury -- suggest that explosive behavior is becoming routine.
There are plenty of things to be angry about lately: lost jobs, pay cuts, reduced home values and war, to name just a few.
"You see pictures on the news of these grown adults screaming and yelling at each other over the whole insurance issue," says workshop leader John Lee of Mentone, Ala., author of The Anger Solution, published in September. "When there's a massive amount of stress, there will be massive amounts of anger and rage."
It's also providing fodder for researchers. More than 20 presentations on anger and its effects on health and relationships are scheduled at the four-day annual meeting of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies starting today in New York.
"Anger is a normal, natural, emotional experience that is characteristic not only of people but of animals," says Charles Spielberger, director of the Center for Research in Behavioral Medicine and Health Psychology at the University of South Florida-Tampa.
Spielberger, a psychologist known for developing a widely used system to measure people's anger, says anger is "built into us" and has helped humans survive.
"It's at the extremes of anger that it becomes pathological and characteristic of some psychiatric disorders," he says.
Constructive anger
Anger is considered a factor in mental illnesses such as depression, but it is not an official disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association. But anger expert Raymond DiGiuseppe, a psychology professor at St. John's University in Queens, N.Y., is among those who say a new "anger disorder" diagnosis is warranted for people experiencing excessive or uncontrolled anger.
But anger is not all negative, psychologists caution.
"Anger signals a need that is not being filled. There's nothing wrong with anger," says Robert Allan, a clinical psychologist at Weill Cornell Medical College/New York Presbyterian Hospital in New York. "The question is how you express it."
On the plus side, anger can bring about change. Think about the American Revolution, the Boston Tea Party, women's suffrage, the civil rights movement.
"Good anger can get you motivated to resolve conflicts and to fix social injustice and to overcome obstacles in your life," DiGiuseppe says. "You would never want to eliminate" all anger.
In the workplace, anger also can motivate employees, as long as it's not expressed in a shouting match or fisticuffs, says Ricky Griffin, a professor of management at Texas A&M University-College Station, who studies workplace aggression.
"If my boss gives me a low performance appraisal, I may get angry about it, but it may make me want to prove my boss is wrong by working harder," he says.
But if hostility or rage takes over, employer responses can range from not promoting the employee to firing the worker.
The popular idea of anger simmering until it reaches a boiling point is really a myth because the body doesn't "store" anger, says Allan, author of the 2006 book Getting Control of Your Anger.
"If someone keeps bothering you, it may feel like anger is building up. But you are really responding to more negative stimulation. The same problem recurs and recurs ... and boom -- you 'explode,' " he says. But "the anger wasn't accumulating; the stimuli keep recurring."
Such blow-ups can cause very real damage, including increased risk of heart attack and other health problems, he says.
"It's the yelling and screaming and jumping-up-and-down kind of anger that results in sympathetic nervous system activity. It triggers the fight-or-flight response," Allan says. "If you're quietly angry at whomever, your blood pressure and heart rate are normal." That's far less damaging to your health, he adds.
Predicting aggression
DiGiuseppe, co-author of the 2006 book Understanding Anger Disorders, will present a full-day workshop on anger today at the meeting of about 3,600 psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers and students in the field.
His newest research looks at issues of revenge as a major driver of aggression. Among the 4,787 participants, including children, adolescents and adults in the USA and Canada, he says revenge turns out to be the strongest predictor of whether someone will behave in an aggressive way -- either outwardly aggressive or passively aggressive.
And he says 1,000 youths in grades 4 through 12 rated their anger as "good" if it accomplished their motives, even if the motives were destructive. "My anger is good because I wanted to make my little brother pick up my toys and I got him to do it" is one survey comment he cites.
He says such attitudes don't mean kids are socially maladjusted, nor are parents failing. Rather, they suggest the need for better interventions to help young people change their thinking.
Other research on anger and aggression includes a study published last month in the journal Psychological Science. Experiments conducted at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, found that someone's facial structure may predict whether the person has a tendency toward aggression. Volunteers glanced at photos of men whose aggressive tendencies had been previously measured. Even though the photos showed neutral expressions, volunteers' guesses were fairly accurate.
"Estimates of aggression were actually highly correlated with actual aggression," says psychologist Cheryl McCormick. The men's facial width-to-height ratio "may be a cue used to predict propensity for aggression in others," the research paper says.
The findings suggest that subtle differences in face shape may affect the way we judge others' personalities -- and those we see as more aggressive may be treated differently based on expectations of anger or aggression.
Managing those feelings
For real anger issues, many people look to anger management to help handle their feelings. While programs vary, experts say no one really knows how much of an impact court-ordered sessions actually have because follow-up is spotty and little data exist about results.
"The real problem of referring people for anger management is they don't want to give up their anger," says DiGiuseppe. "They feel justified in their anger. That's what makes it so hard to treat."
Markman says the Internet, in many ways, spurs angry feelings because it anonymously allows people to express their ire with no fear of repercussions. But he says getting upset at a blog entry creates negative feelings and tends to heighten the anger.
"We definitely have a lot of anger that's being expressed and not necessarily being expressed in productive ways," he says.
Spielberger says the first step in dealing with angry feelings is to recognize them. "The next step is to try to understand the circumstances that have evoked those feelings. Then you need to look at expressing the anger in ways that will deal with the problem instead of ways that can injure other people."
The most important thing to understand about anger is "if you have too much of it, you can learn to manage it," Allan says. "You need to prioritize and ask yourself how important it is before you make an issue of something."
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