06 Oct Anger builds anger (DANIEL GOLEMAN)
Zillmann’s studies seem to explain the dynamic at work in a familiar
domestic drama I witnessed one day while shopping. Down the
supermarket aisle drifted the emphatic, measured tones of a young
mother to her son, about three: “Put … it … back!”
“But I want it!” he whined, clinging more tightly to a Ninja Turtles
cereal box.
“Put it back!” Louder, her anger taking over.
At that moment the baby in her shopping cart seat dropped the jar
of jelly she had been mouthing. When it shattered on the floor the
mother yelled, “That’s it!” and, in a fury, slapped the baby, grabbed
the three-year-old’s box and slammed it onto the nearest shelf,
scooped him up by the waist, and rushed down the aisle, the shopping
cart careening perilously in front, the baby now crying, her son, his
legs dangling, protesting, “Put me down, put me down!”
Zillmann has found that when the body is already in a state of
edginess, like the mother’s, and something triggers an emotional
hijacking, the subsequent emotion, whether anger or anxiety, is of
especially great intensity. This dynamic is at work when someone
becomes enraged. Zillmann sees escalating anger as “a sequence of
provocations, each triggering an excitatory reaction that dissipates
slowly.” In this sequence every successive anger-provoking thought or
perception becomes a minitrigger for amygdala-driven surges of
catecholamines, each building on the hormonal momentum of those
that went before. A second comes before the first has subsided, and a
third on top of those, and so on; each wave rides the tails of those
before, quickly escalating the body’s level of physiological arousal. A
thought that comes later in this buildup triggers a far greater intensity
of anger than one that comes at the beginning. Anger builds on anger;
the emotional brain heats up. By then rage, unhampered by reason,
easily erupts in violence.
At this point people are unforgiving and beyond being reasoned
with; their thoughts revolve around revenge and reprisal, oblivious to
what the consequences may be. This high level of excitation, Zillmann
says, “fosters an illusion of power and invulnerability that may inspire
and facilitate aggression” as the enraged person, “failing cognitive
guidance,” falls back on the most primitive of responses. The limbic
urge is ascendant; the rawest lessons of life’s brutality become guides
to action.
Balm for Anger
Given this analysis of the anatomy of rage, Zillmann sees two main
ways of intervening. One way of defusing anger is to seize on and
challenge the thoughts that trigger the surges of anger, since it is the
original appraisal of an interaction that confirms and encourages the
first burst of anger, and the subsequent reappraisals that fan the
flames. Timing matters; the earlier in the anger cycle the more
effective. Indeed, anger can be completely short-circuited if the
mitigating information comes before the anger is acted on.
The power of understanding to deflate anger is clear from another
of Zillmann’s experiments, in which a rude assistant (a confederate)
insulted and provoked volunteers who were riding an exercise bike.
When the volunteers were given the chance to retaliate against the
rude experimenter (again, by giving a bad evaluation they thought
would be used in weighing his candidacy for a job) they did so with
an angry glee. But in one version of the experiment another
confederate entered after the volunteers had been provoked, and just
before the chance to retaliate; she told the provocative experimenter
he had a phone call down the hall. As he left he made a snide remark
to her too. But she took it in good spirits, explaining after he left that
he was under terrible pressures, upset about his upcoming graduate
orals. After that the irate volunteers, when offered the chance to
retaliate against the rude fellow, chose not to; instead they expressed
compassion for his plight.
Such mitigating information allows a reappraisal of the angerprovoking events.
But there is a specific window of opportunity for
this de-escalation. Zillmann finds it works well at moderate levels of
anger; at high levels of rage it makes no difference because of what he
calls “cognitive incapacitation”—in other words, people can no longer
think straight. When people were already highly enraged, they
dismissed the mitigating information with “That’s just too bad!” or
“the strongest vulgarities the English language has to offer,” as
Zillmann put it with delicacy.
Emotional Intelligence
DANIEL GOLEMAN