components of anger

last week, i felt the strongest anger i’ve felt in two years.

intense anger is a foreign feeling to me. there’s many daily annoyances and frustrations, but they’re minor, passing, footnotes that don’t make it to my written memory. no, this was different. this was the first time in a while i felt anger and sustained it for a few minutes. i acted out some aggression too, saying and typing snark, then realizing i didn’t want to be seen like that and apologizing, but still feeling weird about the whole thing.

let’s lean a bit on appraisal theory. we can decompose an instance of anger into three components, as we can with any emotion: stimulus, appraisal, and response.

take my case as an example. the stimulus was someone at work proposing that we do some task. i appraised this as something that threatened my goals at work, and connected it to what i perceived as someone’s ongoing pattern of behavior. my response was to raise my voice and express what i was feeling. to expand on individual bits:

the stimulus is the trigger, the provocation, the thing that happens right before. this determines, in part, what emotion we experience:

• joy is associated with well-being, success, and good luck.
• sadness is associated with loss, grief, and disappointment.
• both fear and anger are associated with perceived dangers and threats.

discrete emotion theory holds these associations are biologically determined; the theory of constructed emotion holds these associations are socially learned. in any case, the kind of stimulus affects the emotion.

however, the stimulus alone isn’t enough: we also need appraisal. this is the part where we interpret, evaluate, pattern-match, both the stimulus and our possible responses. appraisal explains why the same situation can lead to different emotions. in a dangerous situation, some might feel fear, others might feel anger. (or, you know, increased heart rate and elevated adrenaline, which kinda looks like anger.)

the structural model splits appraisal into two parts, primary and secondary appraisal. primary appraisal takes the stimulus and asks: does this situation affect me, and if so, by how much, and in what ways? the associations i listed above aren’t quite accurate, because we don’t directly read a situation as, say, a stroke of luck, or a blocker for our goals; we only read it as such after primary appraisal.

secondary appraisal is all the other kinds of appraisal. who or what is accountable for the stimulus? how would the situation change in the future? what’s my bodily capacity for reacting in certain ways? my case is one example where each of these contributed to my anger:

• i held a specific person for being responsible for the situation. if i instead blamed something like, macroeconomic conditions, i would’ve felt less angry, maybe closer to frustrated. or if i blamed myself, i might’ve felt guilty.

• i thought that expressing my anger could change the situation, and that if i didn’t, it would continue. if i thought that the situation would stop on its own, i might’ve felt amused or annoyed. or, if i thought that i wouldn’t be listened to, i might’ve felt powerless or sad.

• i was already feeling stressed, so it wouldn’t take a lot of hormonal changes to feel intense anger. if i was instead feeling sluggish or apathetic, i might’ve felt sad. or if my body has, somehow, run out of adrenaline and cortisol and whatever, then maybe i wouldn’t have felt anger, i dunno i’m not a scientist.

the last emotional component is response, which includes the physiological changes in our body, and any things we end up saying or doing. to recap: an emotional instance consists of stimulus (trigger), appraisal (interpretation), and response. all three of these factors influence the emotion we experience.

the process in which our brains go from stimulus to response is so fast that we don’t notice the appraisal, even though it’s a huge component of what the final emotion is. in particular, appraisal happens subconsciously. that’s probably why a decent chunk of emotional maturity is about mastering appraisal?

for example, consider cbt’s thought records. these are worksheets, given out as homework. in each row, you list an event, associated emotions, what thoughts led to those emotions, and—crucially—an alternate thought that you could’ve had instead.

while thought records sometimes include a column for the emotional response, the goal isn’t to change that (except in an indirect way); the goal is to change the emotional appraisal. sometimes there’s a column for evidence for or against the thoughts, which is kinda like breaking down the appraisal into primary and secondary bits.

in general, many emotional regulation strategies focus on reappraisal, or conscious reinterpretations of the stimulus. a meta-analysis shows that, of emotional regulation strategies, reappraisal is more effective than other kinds.

anyway, let’s back up from the theory. i’ve mentioned, in the secondary appraisal section above, what things could’ve affected how i felt in that situation, and i stated that my stress led me to anger more easily than otherwise. if this happened when i was going through a depressive episode, i probably wouldn’t have been angry. that’s kinda why i don’t feel anger that often, i think; much of the time, instead of being angry at something, i would instead feel sad.

in clouds over rochester, rather than being disappointed about not seeing a cool solar eclipse, i could’ve instead been angry at myself, maybe, or the world, for preventing me from doing so. i mean, i think both responses are kinda dysfunctional, and both of them point to the same underlying want. so how do they differ?

the difference kinda feels like the resignation/surrender dichotomy i draw in don’t burn out on me. sadness makes me want to withdraw and give up, anger makes me want to engage and fight. in a sense, both of these are extremes in opposite directions, where sadness is too passive, and anger is too active. i dunno. my baselines for emotion are all over the place so i have no idea if my anger is within the bounds of normality, whatever that means?