The Disease to Please by Harriet Braiker

Author:Harriet Braiker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2001-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

Anger Is a Matter of Degree

Like many people, you probably have a number of misconceptions about the nature of anger that contribute to and inflate your fears. First, you may equate anger, which is an emotional state, with aggression, which is a behavior.

Aggression includes a deliberate intent to hurt, harm, or injure another, or to do damage to an inanimate object. Your fear of anger is based on the expectation that it will always lead to aggressive action, expressed either unilaterally or in the form interpersonal conflict.

Under certain circumstances, anger may indeed lead to aggression. However, it does not necessarily or inevitably do so. Learning to manage angry feelings and to express them effectively and appropriately greatly reduces the probability that aggression will develop when anger is aroused.

The second misconception is that anger functions like an on/off switch. In this inaccurate and polarized view, you are either calm and cool, or riled up and enraged. When anger is in the “off” switch position, you are clear and rational without visible signs of being upset or internal cues of anger. Once switched to the “on” mode, however, negative emotions are fully flared and you are now both manifestly and inwardly angry, agitated, and upset.

The black and white view of anger is simply incorrect. Anger doesn’t work only on a two-position on/off switch. Instead, anger develops incrementally, on an arousal scale

There is a great deal of individual variation, from one person to another, with respect to the speed with which anger escalates on the scale. Some people, known as “hot responders,” have a short fuse on their anger. For these types, the escalation from zero (no anger) to 100 (raging anger) occurs very quickly and can even create the illusion of an on/off phenomenon. Nonetheless, even the hot responders develop anger incrementally across increasing levels of arousal.

For other individuals, known as “cool responders,” anger increases more slowly along the scale. A cool responder ultimately can become every bit as enraged as the hot responding counterpart, but he or she just gets there in a slower, more deliberate fashion.

People also differ with respect to the frequency or incidence rate of their angry responses and on the type of incidents to which they respond with anger. The original research on Type A personalities uncovered a notably higher risk of cardiovascular disease that was believed to be associated with such characteristics as “hurry sickness” (i.e., feeling constantly pressured by doing too much in too little time), impatience, competitiveness, and free-floating anger and hostility.8 Over time, however, this rich vein of research on stress has demonstrated unequivocally that the real core of cardiac-proneness is chronic hostility and frequent outbursts of volatile anger.

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