Emotional Brains

Anger in a business setting can cause one to act inappropriately or unwisely by blowing an incident out of proportion and possibly irrevocably damaging a career. Learning that at any moment we have the ability to consciously control our anger is empowering but not that easy to accomplish. Goleman asserts the body’s chemical reaction to stressful situations, relating back to our ancient ancestors, is the reason for this difficulty. The introduction of hormones into the body is not a gradual elevation, but a quick release relating back to our basic fight or flight response to environmental dangers. Every day, hormones are incrementally released into the body with each passing taxing stressful episode until a level is reached that triggers anger. He offers two weapons against anger outbursts. The first is method is to recognize, as early as possible, what is triggering the anger. This disruption of the anger

People can then use this knowledge to guide their actions so that we don't upset or anger them. In the last decade, it has been nudged firmly to one side by evidence, that we are Homo empathicus - wired for empathy (Krznaric xii). Biologically, our emotions are processed by the amygdala, a part of the brain that is responsible for emotion. The amygdala is part of the limbic system in the brain. The limbic system is a doughnut-shaped system of neural structures at the border of the brainstem and cerebral hemispheres. It is associated with emotions such as fear and aggression and drives such as those for food and sex. It includes the hippocampus, amygdala, and hypothalamus (Dartmouth). Experiments have been done on monkeys where their amygdala was surgically lesioned. The result was a monkey, which was originally ill-tempered, that would remain calm no matter what you did to it (Teddy Brain). The amygdala thus links to the empathy people feel during their normal

Different emotions are processed in distinct ways by the brain. To understand the processing methods Devenport, Doctor of Philosphy, Thiel, PhD, and Connelly and Kligyte both professors of psychology at the University of Oklahoma, juxtapose in their Human Performance article, the effects of two intense emotions: anger and fear. Their studies show anger to be linked with feelings of certainty, individual control, displaced responsibility, and threatened self-esteem. They explain that anger is processed “heuristically” or from the top down, and that this kind of processing includes biased and retaliatory thinking. This results in a limitation of the focus of a situation’s interpretation to oneself, and such thinking is linked to preferences for risky and impulsive behaviour and

When someone experiences anger, there body goes through a series of steps to produced the emotion. The first step begins in the amygdala; it sends out a signal that alerts someone when they are in danger. This happens naturally without anyone having to think about it. The brain does not have time to process enough information in the cortex to decide whether the threat is pertinent. The second step involves the muscles in the body tensing up, and someone experiencing a sudden increase in energy. Adrenal gland release adrenaline and someone's body becomes focused on the instigator of their anger. Luckily, someone's prefrontal cortex controls the person's reasoning and makes the final decision on what to do when they are angry. Just as the body takes steps to become angry, it takes steps to calm down. Someone starts to calm down when the instigator is no longer present. Even with the instigator no longer present, someone can still be easily angered because the body has adrenaline present in its system, and it can take days for them to go back to

One of the most common mistakes we make when stressed by upsetting experiences is to try to shut off our awareness of emotional brain’s ability to sense what we are feeling. We can lose the ability to care in a positive way. We may become insensitive to hurting other people with our words or actions. Our strongest automatic coping response is from reptilian brain, which senses when we are physically threatened by “danger.” The smart way to use our brain is by using the neocortex thinking ability to decide how we should be coping to get over emotional upsets.

Throughout life, people are accustomed to falling victim to their own anger. Anger results from

Unregulated anger has been found to lead to aggression, which can subsequently result in violence (Green & Shellenberger, 1991). As reported by Howells & Day (2003), anger and its preceding emotions such as fear and sadness are normal and are often functional in their expression. However, as anger has the capacity to cause non-functional behaviours such as withdrawal, aggression and avoidance, it often causes extreme distress to an individual and those around them.

While angry, people get out of control, sometimes not even realizing what they’re doing until after it’s done. “Interestingly, the effects of incidental emotion can be so strong that they drive behavior even when people have a financial incentive to disregard irrelevant influences on their judgment.” ("Fuel in the Fire: How Anger Impacts Judgment and Decision-Making”) Saying that, it’s clear that one of the main reasons why people make the choices that they do is because of their

According to previous research on the feelings toward individuals who could or could not control their outcomes, one may assume that undesirable emotions such as anger would

Training in anger management developed more positive attitudes to people with problems of anger and aggression (Levey & Howells, 1990). In the study of Novaco (1976) anger can have a disruptive effect on behavior. When arousal is high, anger interferes with efficient task performance. Cognitive processes become disorganized, and reactions become impulsive. Although anger has many positive functions (i.e. energizing, expressive, potentiating) it also has many maladaptive functions (e.g. it can disrupt task performance and problem-solving, and can activate aggressive behaviour). One of the most recognizable functions of anger arousal is that it energizes our behavior. Anger increases the vigor with which we act. This can result in strong motor responses, such as slamming doors or raising the volume of one’s voice. This energizing effect can also enable a person to assertively confront provocation or injustice. As an emotional response to provocation, the arousal of anger and the cognitive processes are related with that arousal (i.e., thoughts about the provoking person and the uncomfortable situation) can start an aggressive actions (Novaco,1976), it can be suppressed (anger-in), directed outward in a healthy way (anger-discuss), directed outward in the form of attacking or blaming others (anger-out), or expressed somatically through symptoms like headache (anger symptoms) (Atakan &

“Anybody can become angry-that is easy, but to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody 's power and is not easy” (Leonard, Miles & Ban der Kar, 1994, p. 203). This is a quote from Aristotle, which is consistent with what has been called emotion regulation (Gross, 1998).

In class, we talked about how the brain affects behavior in humans. Anger is a great example to demonstrate this point. First, an outside stimulus; for example, a delayed airport shuttle, is acknowledged by the brain. This is immediate cause for concern, for the brain quickly calculates that the shuttle's delay could potentially result in missing the scheduled flight. This is the threat that causes heart rate go up, adrenaline and noradrenaline are quickly released and the person

Anger is a complex emotion. Anger can be a destructive behavior if man could not control it. The levels of anger relate to information which is processed of attributions, images, and thoughts that include one feeling excessively blamed, attacked, wronged, inferior, and violated. Anger appears to direct attention, perceptions, memory, and interests into paths of aggression (Averill 135). Anger perception differs from one to another. There are people who easily provoked and others who hardly get angry. There are many factors that control this process such as gender differences, environment, and culture. Moreover, People consider anger as their enemy but it sometimes can be a helpful tool of changing for the self and society. Anger can make

“Anger naturally triggers the fight/flight response, which mentally and physically prepares the body for survival. During the flight/flight response, the

Anger has always been a mystery to me. I have been wanting to research about anger for a few years now. I never got the chance, or maybe was just too lazy to bother and research. I finally got to do my research and got my curiosity over with thanks to my English teacher. I chose this topic because I have been eager to know how and what triggers that little chimp in our minds to let us become angry. What means we can learn to control our reactions. We all have encountered angry people and each of us, at times, felt angry.