ABSTRACT
Psychiatric outpatients present with anger problems as frequently as they do with anxiety and depression. In fact, more than a quarter of outpatients reported a significant anger symptom. This chapter explores how people learn to become angry and suggests that interventions should be built upon this knowledge and not upon the models of other emotions. Classical conditioning is one mechanism through which emotional expression is acquired. Specifically, research has firmly established that humans and other animals learn to connect fear and anxiety through the mechanisms of classical conditioning. The entire literature on the classical conditioning of anger and aggression is minuscule compared with the literature on classical conditioning of the fear response. The distinction between affective and instrumental aggression may have prevented the development of research on anger as an instrumental or operantly learned system. According to this distinction, reinforcement occurs in the instrumental nonaffective aggression.
