ABSTRACT
The Old Norse word angr, the root of both “anger” and “anguish,” meant distress, grief, sorrow, and trouble. Consistent with this ancient view of anger as stressful, anguishing, and troublesome, anger is today understood as a problematic emotional state that can be elicited by a wide variety of conditions. These triggers include the perception that one’s attempted or anticipated gratification of some appetite or need is (or has been) unjustifiably impeded, or that one’s access to the goals, resources, authority, or status, which one either currently possesses, or seeks, and to which one feels legitimately entitled, is unfairly and unexpectedly challenged or eroded. Power and Dalgleish (1997: 305) note that anger occurs “as the result of an appraisal of some deliberate, negligent, or at least avoidable slight or wrongdoing, … most usually directed at another person,” and is intended as “punishment for, or correction of, the wrong that has been carried out.” Thus, anger can sometimes be considered a sociomoral emotion, arising in response to another’s perceived violation of a social norm or failure to perform required duties, and directed toward whoever is held blameworthy. Because there “continue to exist … insults, impediments, stumbling blocks, hindrances, and threats to our well-being, psychological growth, vocational satisfaction, and spiritual development, [w]e are all, and always will be, as Shakespeare”s Hamlet opined, susceptible to the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’” and therefore to anger (Stephen Diamond 1996: 14). Among the majority of emotions researchers who acknowledge the existence of fundamental, elementary, basic, or primary, emotions, nearly everyone after Alexander Shand (1914) has included anger (see Table 1.1). Anger’s classification as a primary emotion is strongly suggested by its presence in a wide variety of animal species and by its early emergence in the developing human infant. 1 Anger ranges in intensity from mild irritation or annoyance to furious, animalistic, primordial rage. Rage is frequently, but not always, a pathological form of anger. The word rage “usually adds to anger the idea of loss of control, of inner frustration, vengefulness, or temporary derangement.” Fury implies an extreme, overmastering rage and sometimes refers to a violent and indignant anger kept barely under control. Darwin (1872) posited an evolutionary linkage between anger in the human being and in lesser species ranging from fish to monkeys and apes, demonstrating that anger – in its basest form, rage – is a primitive emotion with a long evolutionary history.
