Anger: The Anger Response Model

To help understand anger and our responses to it, I have developed what I call the Anger Response Model.

The model demonstrates anger as a two-stage response. The first stage is a physiological response as the human body prepares to take some form of emergency action. The second stage is the action that is taken and depends upon whether you decide to express anger or repress it. In this and succeeding chapters, we will come back to the Anger Response Model to explain the origins and effects of anger.

ANGER:  A Primitive Response

Can you imagine a time when the survival of an individual or a family depended upon their ability to react swiftly to danger? In some long-ago era, the ancestors of our species were faced with many dangers in the wild. Predators threatened the weak and the young. Other tribes competed for food, fresh water, and safe shelter. Those individuals who were able to recognize danger first and react the fastest were the ones who survived. This response to external threats seems to be closely linked to our modern-day anger response.

Perhaps anger is a relic of this earlier time, when quick reactions were necessary for survival. The anger response may be a descendant of the males’ territoriality instinct and of the females’ urge to protect their young. 

Certainly these responses are important to the survival of people in a primitive society, but how do they fit into the complexities of our modern, civilized society? Whether they fit or not, they (or the very-similar anger responses) are still with us. 

Consider the various situations in which people get angry. Can you see any common threads running through them? Try making a list of things that make you feel angry.

Here are some things people have told me make them angry:

• When people don't listen to me
• People who interrupt
• Inconsiderate people
• Child abuse
• My boss acts like he owns me
• Bigots
• People who don't use their turn signals
• Bigshots who think they can boss you around
• Lateness - being kept waiting
• When my mother tries to tell me how to live
• Men who cheat on their wives
• When I get blamed for someone else's mistake
• Hypocrisy
• People who think they're holier-than-thou
• Indecisiveness
• Sarcastic people
• Unfair criticism
• Litterbugs
• People who don't keep promises
• Bullying………………….

.... and the list could go on and on.

How does your list compare with this one? Perhaps you have discovered, as I did, that different things make different people angry. One example of this is the way people feel about hunting. Many Americans have grown up in a culture in which hunting is a natural, accepted part of life, as much a sport as a way of bringing food home to the family and controlling the size of the deer herds. For another segment of society, hunting is viewed as a barbaric anachronism which is unnecessary and which appeals only to the uncultured rustic who has some need to prove his manhood by killing. For yet another group, hunting is of no interest and raises no passions, either for or against. Obviously, the same subject may outrage some people while having a very different effect on others. What may anger and upset you may mean nothing to me.1

YOU THINK YOU'RE BEING ATTACKED

In any anger-provoking situation, there is the perception that, somehow, you are being attacked. The attack may not be a real one—the mere threat of an attack may be enough. The attack may not be direct—an attack on what you believe in can also make you angry. And the threat or attack may be communicated to you by many different means:

• Words - written or spoken
• Tone of Voice
• Gestures
• Facial Expression
• Body Language
• Symbolically
• Via Print, TV, Radio, Film, in Person, or by word of mouth
• or by a combination of these.

Whatever the means of communication, your anger is triggered when you perceive yourself under attack. Needless to say, you don't always perceive the threat or attack, so you don't always get angry when you “should” and sometimes you feel angry for no obvious reason. There are times when an imagined slight will set off an anger response and times when a situation one might expect to provoke anger, or which is intended to hurt, doesn’t arouse feelings of anger.2 What matters is NOT the nature of the attack, but how it is perceived by the “attackee.”