Anger and Agression

Many psychologists have done research in the field of anger and aggression as it is one of the most common emotions experienced by humans. If prolonged, it can lead to devastating effects such as depression, headaches and various other disorders. A lot of work is being done to help people over come anger and to learn to forgive others. Anger is a feeling which results due to unfulfilled expectations, injustice, frustration, injury or it might be biologically determined. Aggression is the action you take in response to your anger i.e. attacking an individual or a group. There are five inter related dimensions (i.e. cognition, emotion, communication, affect and behavior) which operate simultaneously in any angry situation. Cognition refers to our present thoughts, emotion is the physiological arousal that anger produces, communication is the way in which we show our anger to people, Affect is the way we experience life when we are angry, and lastly, behavior is the way we act when we are angry. All these dimensions collectively shape our thoughts and actions when we are angry or frustrated (http://www.psc.uc.edu/sh/SH_Anger.htm). The real cause behind angry and aggressive behavior is still unclear. Some theorists such as Freud and Konrad Lorenz said that people behaved aggressively because it is ‘human nature’ to be hostile and aggressive towards people who we dislike or who are different from us. They said that heredity, hormones, or brain dysfunction were the possible causes of aggression and totally ruled out other possibilities such as external influences. Other theorists (for example Brine and Kelley) said that frustration lead to anger. The social learning theorists (such as Bandura) believed that aggression was not innate nor did frustration lead to anger. According to him, people learned to become aggressive by observing aggressive models and receiving payoffs following aggression. The fault with all these theories is that they have attributed aggression to only one cause, ignoring the other side of the issue. It would be wrong to say that aggression is directly a consequence of heredity as child rearing and observational learning does play a major role in shaping a person’s behavior. Thus, we have to consider both sides of the argument and accept that all these influences are important factors in causing aggression. (http://www.mentalhelp.net/psyhelp...

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...re some people try to suppress their anger to be accepted by the society rather than curing it. We’ll have to admit that heredity does play an important role in shaping a person’s behavior. All human beings have the tendency to get aggressive and angry even if they haven’t been exposed to any violence in media or in their surroundings. At some point in their lives, all humans act aggressively regardless of how good their external environment is. On the other hand, external factors also play a pivotal role in determining how aggressive a person is. Therefore, we cannot say that there is only a single cause of aggression for all human beings; it varies from person to person. For some, aggression might be learnt, for others it may be innate. Whatever the cause might be, aggression should be properly channelized and cured so that this world becomes a better place to live in.

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REFERENCES

1. http://www.apa.org/monitor/mar03/whenanger.html http://www.apa.org/topics/topic_anger.html http://www.mentalhelp.net/psyhelp/chap7/ http://www.nmha.org/infoctr/factsheets/44.cfm http://www.psc.uc.edu/sh/SH_Anger.htm:

http://health.yahoo.com/centers/personality/2787