The Angry Movie
Thomas Merino
Cecilia Munoz is vice president of the Office of Research, Advocacy and Legislation at the National Council of La Raza. Born in Detroit to Bolivian immigrants, she has worked on behalf of Hispanic-Americans. Munoz was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. Nubar Alexanian hide caption
I remember the exact moment when I discovered outrage as a kind of fuel. It was about 1980. I was 17, the daughter of Bolivian immigrants growing up in suburban Detroit. After a dinner table conversation with my family about the wars going on in Central America and the involvement of the United States (my country by birth and my parents' country by choice), a good friend said the thing that set me off. He told me that he thought the U.S. might someday go to war somewhere in Latin America. He looked me in the eye and told me that if it happens, he believes my parents belong in an internment camp just like the Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Now this was someone who knew us, who had sat at our table and knew how American we are. We are a little exotic maybe, but it never occurred to me that we were anything but an American family. For my friend, as for many others, there will always be doubt as to whether we really belong in this country, which is our home, enough doubt to justify taking away our freedom. My outrage that day became the propellant of my life, driving me straight to the civil rights movement, where I've worked ever since.
I guess outrage got me pretty far. I found jobs in the immigrant rights movement. I moved to Washington to work as an advocate. I found plenty more to be angry about along the way and built something of a reputation for being strident. Someone once sent my mom an article about my work. She was proud and everything but wanted to know why her baby was described as "ferocious."
Anger has a way, though, of hollowing out your insides. In my first job, if we helped 50 immigrant families in a day, the faces of the five who didn't qualify haunted my dreams at night. When I helped pass a bill in Congress to help Americans reunite with their immigrant families, I could only think of my cousin who didn't qualify and who had to wait another decade to get her immigration papers.
I am deeply familiar with that hollow place that outrage carves in your soul. I've fed off of it to sustain my work for many years. But it hasn't eaten me away completely, maybe because the hollow place gets filled with other, more powerful things like compassion, faith, family, music, the goodness of people around me. These things fill me up and temper my outrage with a deep sense of gratitude that I have the privilege of doing my small part to make things better.
We all get angry, but we often deal with it in different ways. Some people constantly lash out in frustration at others, or stew about it and complain about it to people they talk to. Some people repress their anger, with the idea that they should never feel anger, that anger is not safe for others or themselves. Others seethe and seethe quietly, until finally they explode. Some of us do all three.
A person experiencing anger will often experience physical effects, such as increased heart rate, elevated blood pressure, and increased levels of adrenaline and noradrenaline.[3] Some view anger as an emotion which triggers part of the fight or flight response.[4] Anger becomes the predominant feeling behaviorally, cognitively, and physiologically when a person makes the conscious choice to take action to immediately stop the threatening behavior of another outside force.[5]
Anger can have many physical and mental consequences. The external expression of anger can be found in facial expressions, body language, physiological responses, and at times public acts of aggression. Facial expressions can range from inward angling of the eyebrows to a full frown.[6] While most of those who experience anger explain its arousal as a result of "what has happened to them", psychologists point out that an angry person can very well be mistaken because anger causes a loss in self-monitoring capacity and objective observability.[7]
Modern psychologists view anger as a normal, natural, and mature emotion experienced by virtually all humans at times, and as something that has functional value for survival. Uncontrolled anger can negatively affect personal or social well-being[7][8] and negatively impact those around them. While many philosophers and writers have warned against the spontaneous and uncontrolled fits of anger, there has been disagreement over the intrinsic value of anger.[9] The issue of dealing with anger has been written about since the times of the earliest philosophers, but modern psychologists, in contrast to earlier writers, have also pointed out the possible harmful effects of suppressing anger.[9]
Anger can potentially mobilize psychological resources and boost determination toward correction of wrong behaviors, promotion of social justice, communication of negative sentiment, and redress of grievances. It can also facilitate patience. In contrast, anger can be destructive when it does not find its appropriate outlet in expression. Anger, in its strong form, impairs one's ability to process information and to exert cognitive control over one's behavior. An angry person may lose their objectivity, empathy, prudence or thoughtfulness and may cause harm to themselves or others.[7][11][12] There is a sharp distinction between anger and aggression (verbal or physical, direct or indirect) even though they mutually influence each other. While anger can activate aggression or increase its probability or intensity, it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for aggression.[7]
Extension of the stimuli of the fighting reactions: At the beginning of life, the human infant struggles indiscriminately against any restraining force, whether it be another human being or a blanket which confines their movements. There is no inherited susceptibility to social stimuli as distinct from other stimulation, in anger. At a later date the child learns that certain actions, such as striking, scolding, and screaming, are effective toward persons, but not toward things. In adults, though the infantile response is still sometimes seen, the fighting reaction becomes fairly well limited to stimuli whose hurting or restraining influence can be thrown off by physical violence.[13]
Brain regions which are activated when recognizing threat or provocation, and facilitate autonomic arousal and interoception and activate the stress response, are the salience network (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula cortex) and subcortical area (the thalamus, the amygdala, and the brain stem).[14][15]
Raymond Novaco of University of California Irvine, who since 1975 has published a plethora of literature on the subject, stratified anger into three modalities: cognitive (appraisals), somatic-affective (tension and agitations), and behavioral (withdrawal and antagonism).[16]
The words annoyance and rage are often imagined to be at opposite ends of an emotional continuum: mild irritation and annoyance at the low end and fury at the high end. Rage problems are conceptualized as "the inability to process emotions or life's experiences"[17] either because the capacity to regulate emotion (Schore, 1994)[18] has never been sufficiently developed or because it has been temporarily lost due to more recent trauma. Rage is understood as raw, undifferentiated emotions, that spill out when another life event that cannot be processed, no matter how trivial, puts more stress on the organism than it can bear.
Anger, when viewed as a protective response or instinct to a perceived threat, is considered as positive. The negative expression of this state is known as aggression commits antisocial personality disorder[19] and Intermittent explosive disorder. Acting on this misplaced state is rage due to possible potential errors in perception and judgment.
Anger expression can take on many more styles than passive or aggressive. Ephrem Fernandez has identified six dimensions of anger expression. They relate to the direction of anger, its locus, reaction, modality, impulsivity, and objective. Coordinates on each of these dimensions can be connected to generate a profile of a person's anger expression style. Among the many profiles that are theoretically possible in this system, are the familiar profile of the person with explosive anger, profile of the person with repressive anger, profile of the passive aggressive person, and the profile of constructive anger expression.[23]
Much research has explored whether the emotion of anger is experienced and expressed differently depending on the culture. Matsumoto (2007) conducted a study in which White-American and Asian participants needed to express the emotions from a program called JACFEE (Japanese and Caucasian Facial Expression of Emotion) in order to determine whether Caucasian observers noticed any differences in expression of participants of a different nationality. He found that participants were unable to assign a nationality to people demonstrating expression of anger, i.e. they could not distinguish ethnic-specific expressions of anger.[24] Hatfield, Rapson, and Le (2009) conducted a study that measured ethnic differences in emotional expression using participants from the Philippines, Hawaii, China, and Europe. They concluded that there was a difference between how someone expresses an emotion, especially the emotion of anger in people with different ethnicities, based on frequency, with Europeans showing the lowest frequency of expression of negative emotions.[25]
Other research investigates anger within different ethnic groups who live in the same country. Researchers explored whether Black Americans experience and express greater anger than Whites (Mabry & Kiecolt, 2005). They found that, after controlling for sex and age, Black participants did not feel or express more anger than Whites.[26] Deffenbacher and Swaim (1999) compared the expression of anger in Mexican American people and White non-Hispanic American people. They concluded that White non-Hispanic Americans expressed more verbal aggression than Mexican Americans, although when it came to physical aggression expressions there was no significant difference between both cultures when it came to anger.[27]
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