Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love (2 page)

That’s when I began to be afraid for everyone’s safety. The sky outside was limpid, but Bruce’s face looked like a thunderstorm. It was as if he felt trapped in a narrow corridor and his only goal was to get out of it as fast as possible. He just jumped out of the car and started to yell at the other driver, who, meanwhile, had quickly vanished. Everyone behind began protesting that we were obstructing the exit and Bruce raged at them all, telling them to shut up. Luckily, no one got out of their car and, before he could run towards them, I grabbed him and pulled him back inside.

We got out of there and, to be honest, all I could think about was a hammock under the shadow of a tree at my friends’ house.

An overwhelming force

Anger is a crude emotion, a mighty force that can be very difficult to contain. For it to surface, it may be enough that events simply run contrary to the way we expect them to go for us. We express anger if we are ill treated, if we feel we have been slighted, if someone offends us or when we won’t or can’t tolerate certain kinds of behaviour. Anger is also fear with an armour. It works as a defensive, pre-emptive reaction before something hurtful can be done to us. Anger may be impulsive and spontaneous, acted out impetuously in brief and acute bursts, but it may also be silent and premeditated, lucid and controlled. It can be both an immediate response to provocation and the fuel for future retaliation. What is interesting about anger is that it can lurk restrained for a long time, erupt wildly and fleetingly, and then return to a quieter state. Once past the hot, flashing eruption of a blinding fury, you can remain angry at someone for a long time. In all its forms, anger inescapably entails morality. The inability to control impulsive reactions puts our character to the test, and can be seen as weakness or a defeat of the will. Yielding to rage may have repercussions for our position in the social world and may jeopardize our interpersonal relations.

Of all emotions, anger is, for sure, the one that is most foreign to me. I am not irascible and I am not given to rages either. I can engage in a short verbal argument to resolutely put my point across because I dislike being misunderstood and disregarded in a conversation. On occasion I have also incisively pointed out my rights during over-heated conversations with customer services hotlines. But I never get into an aggressive verbal fight or, far less, become physically aggressive or abusive. I was never attracted to violence. However, one situation where I believe I could express extreme anger would be if anybody deliberately harmed a member of my family, or one of my best friends, especially if they did it before my eyes.

 • • • 

So why did Bruce react so vehemently to an unexpected Saturday morning queue? Why couldn’t he deal better with his frustration, and what pushed him to yell at the other drivers?

When we reached our friends’ cottage, Bruce wound down with an ice-cold drink. During a quiet moment he started telling me he had experienced similar outbursts of anger in the past. In certain situations he turned ugly, then later regretted it and wasn’t happy about it. Especially when provoked, he was often incapable of controlling his reactions and this, of course, worried him. If someone contradicted him or didn’t agree with him, he would make a fuss and, occasionally, put up a fight. But his rages could also take place in solitude. Once, angry at a small offence received at work, he smashed his own car’s windscreen as a way to vent his frustration. He thought there was something wrong with him and asked me if his repetitive and uncontrollable explosions of anger might have something to do with his genes and the hard-wiring of his brain.

Clearly, some of us are more prone to anger than others. Why is that? Are we born aggressive, or is the propensity to express anger a consequence of upbringing, or a response to socially negative experiences or an unfavourable environment?

In this chapter I am going to address this question by telling you what we know about the neuroscience of anger and violence and what brain mechanisms underlie self-control.

But first, there is a lot I need to tell you about emotions in general.

The origin of emotions

It would be unthinkable to talk about emotions without evoking the work of Charles Darwin. The brilliant British naturalist, most famous for having fathered the theory of natural selection and evolution, did not overlook the importance of understanding how we emote. In 1872, about a dozen years after
On the Origin of Species
, Darwin published a beautiful volume called
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
, his biggest legacy to the field of psychology.
¹

Darwin based his work on a few original resources. First, during several dinner parties at his country home in Kent, Darwin asked his guests to describe and comment on the emotions they recognized in a series of pictures. The pictures he showed them were eleven black-and-white photographs taken by the French anatomist Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne. These depicted an elderly man’s face, to which Duchenne had applied galvanizing electrodes to specific muscles to trigger a variety of facial expressions. Darwin asked his guests to describe what emotion they thought the man’s face showed. An indefatigable collector, Darwin had never ceased to look for portrayals of emotion. He scoured galleries and bookshops for images and prints that could further his research. Eventually he also teamed up with a photographer, Oscar Rejlander, to help him capture fleeting moments of the emotions he was looking for. Although Darwin’s experiment is not considered scientific by modern standards – for he relied on only twenty-three guests and his sources were diverse and of debatable objectivity – it was an extremely original and revealing enterprise for that time. Darwin’s use of photographs and portraits also marked a huge leap in the history of scientific illustration.
²

The main merit of Darwin’s book was that it portrayed emotions as an outcome of evolution. By describing in detail emotional expressions in animals and human beings, Darwin made the point that emotions are comparable across the animal kingdom. By this he didn’t mean that, say, the rage experienced by a human can be fully equated to the angry barking of a dog, or that human anxiety is exactly the same as a cat’s fear, but that the evolutionary purposes of the mechanisms of defence and protection behind these emotions are analogous. Darwin meant that each emotion has adaptive purposes and has its evolutionary origins in lower animals. Just like our eyes, legs or other parts of our anatomy, emotions – and all the brain circuits and body parts that we need in order to experience them – have also evolved by natural selection. Within this general framework, it becomes easy to appreciate that the importance of Darwin’s penetrating survey lies in its confirmation that emotions are first and foremost something that happens to the body: a physiological response to the events in the environment – or, of course, a consequence of thoughts and imagination recalling them – that is manifested through various physiological changes.

This view essentially persists today in light of modern neuroscience research and research into emotions in lower animals, such as rodents. Most people ask with scepticism: how can you study anger, joy or anxiety in a mouse or a rat? The answer is simple: you can’t. What is explored in the laboratory are only the universal aspects of emotion, those accomplished by dedicated circuits that allow animals and human beings to survive and thrive.
³
In evolutionary terms, Darwin’s study of expressions suggested that all organisms display innate and conserved primordial emotional mechanisms that help them survive. At opposed extremes on a gradient of such mechanisms are
approach
and
avoidance
, which are strategies for, respectively, achieving pleasure and shunning pain. For instance, available food and sex are clearly powerful motivators for approach because they bring joy and gratification – in addition to promoting survival and reproduction. By contrast, predators or other dangerous situations that cause fear prompt escape and evasion. In order to survive, we must be able to experience both approach and avoidance. These two principal survival mechanisms have been maintained throughout evolution and are shared across the animal kingdom and across different human cultures. With joy and fear at its opposite ends, there is an emotional rainbow of positive and negative emotions. The distinction here is not between good and bad. Again, a good guiding principle is that of approach and avoidance. The negative emotions are anger, guilt, shame, regret, fear and grief, all of which imply something we need to defend ourselves from or avoid. The positive emotions are empathy, joy, laughter, curiosity and hope, which all imply a propensity and desire to open up to the outside world.

At this point there is another important distinction to be made: between emotions and feelings. Feeling is emotion which has been rendered conscious. Although emotions develop as biological processes, they culminate as personal mental experiences. The contrast here is between the outer and visible aspects of an emotion and its inner, intimate experience. The former is a collection of biological responses – from alterations in behaviour and hormonal levels to changes in facial expression – that can, in most cases, be scientifically measured. The latter is the
feeling
, the private awareness of that emotion (philosophers call the study of this subjective experience phenomenology).
⁴
This is why we can describe our own feelings fairly confidently but we can’t describe the internal experiences of others with the same degree of confidence. We can only watch their outward expression and theorize or intuit the inner experience of others. So far, in a laboratory, scientists can detect some of the brain activities that characterize sadness or joy. Yet they can’t grasp the most internal
meaning
of sadness or joy for the person who experiences it. Emotions make our minds speak to each other. They are the most faithful reproduction of our inner worlds, broadcast externally in the expression of our faces.

 • • • 

Darwin’s second important achievement in the study of emotions was his demonstration of their universality. If emotions are innate and a product of evolution, he hypothesized, they should also be widespread and similar across cultures. If all humans around the globe possess the same eyes, mouth, nose and facial muscles, then they should all be equipped to manifest emotions similarly. To show this, he adopted the methods of the anthropologist. He sent a detailed set of questions on all kinds of emotions to cultivated friends and other scholars, as well as to missionaries who travelled in then remote lands such as Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Borneo, India and Ceylon. He received thirty-six answers. This was probably one of the first printed surveys ever produced. Darwin asked his correspondents to report whether populations in those distant cultures, and in particular aboriginal tribes, displayed facial expressions and bodily postures comparable to those he was familiar with in Britain and Europe.

Darwin’s oeuvre is an absolute treasure for the understanding of emotions. It has left a lasting legacy and has inspired many other scholars in this field.
⁵
I will make repeated reference to Darwin when describing the main bodily, and particularly facial, features of emotions. Let’s begin by looking at the facial features of anger.

Anger’s ugly face

Not only was Darwin an incredibly original thinker: he was also a clear and expressive writer. His descriptions are so concrete and accurate that, even when he has no photographs to show, you can visualize the bodily changes he is writing about.

In the case of anger, Darwin remarks that the ‘heart and circulation are always affected’. Indeed, there is nothing like a fit of anger to get your blood flowing and bring on a sudden hot rush – try it, especially if you are feeling cold. Your veins fill up with blood and distend, becoming prominent, especially on your forehead and neck. Blood flows into your hands, as if to prepare them for defensive action. Darwin knew that the arousal of anger involved the brain, and he makes this explicit when he says that the ‘excited brain’ sends vigour to the muscles and ‘energy to the will’. All in all, anger is an electrifying emotion. It empowers us to take action. An angry face ‘reddens or becomes purple’. In anger, we glare. Darwin also notes that, in anger, the mouth commonly stays firmly closed to convey determination, and the teeth usually grit. Occasionally, however, the lips may retract to uncover the teeth, as if to show defiance to those who offend us.

Anger also alters the voice. During an explosion of angry speech there may be so much ferment and uproar that the mouth ‘froths’, as Darwin put it, and words become confused. Indeed, when unbridled, anger is most often a loud emotion, discharged as strident, rowdy, rapid sounds. One thing is certain about anger: it escalates. And you can see it mount in the face of a person who is in a rage. Not only that: it’s as if the whole body heaves and swells up until it finally explodes into verbal and physical outbursts.

An unjustified war

Anger exemplifies the irrepressible vigour of the emotions. It puts our judgement to the test, forcing us to consider how to behave in frustrating circumstances, respond adequately to offence, and decide on the best action. Anger is entangled with choice. Feeling anger raises questions of values and options, and thus of ethics, morality and conduct.

For too long in the history of ideas, when it came to finding an explanation for how we exercise our judgement, an over-rigid and simplistic assumption held sway. This categorically divorced emotion from reason, seeing the two as opposing poles in our mental life. Morality was held to be firmly grounded in logical reasoning, while emotion had nothing to do with it. This divisive theory, until recently so engrained in our culture, originated more than two thousand years ago, in ancient Greece, the cradle of Western thought, mainly in the writings of the philosopher Plato (427–347
BC
), a diligent pupil of Socrates.