Seven Sins: Anger is a very complex emotion, says Alessandro Grecucci
Down To Earth (DTE) speaks to scientists and authors to take stock of what we know so far about the emotions of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth; the historical debates around them and the critical gaps in our understanding.
In the fourteenth part, DTE speaks to Alessandro Grecucci, an associate professor at the University of Trento, Italy. Grecucci studies how humans perceive, modulate and express emotions in normal and abnormal conditions.
Q. Do we understand anger?
A. Anger is highly associated with problematic behaviour and pathological conditions like personality disorders, antisocial personality disorders, borderline personality and narcissistic behaviour. In the near future, maybe, we can use our understanding of which regions of the brain are associated with emotions to build predictive models to understand, diagnose or prevent emotion-related problems. This involves scanning brains and using these predictive models to recognise difficulties, for example, in regulating, expressing and inhibiting emotions.
So, anger is poorly understood, at least at the scientific level. There are so many clinical hypotheses derived from clinical observation. These theories still need to be clarified. For example, there is an interesting hypothesis which says that attachment disruptions caused by excessive anger in primary relationships or with relatives or caregivers, can be the main pathological mechanism behind all psychopathologies. But we do not understand exactly what happens at the brain level. It can be very interesting to study this.
Q. How do these neuro-predictive models work?
A. We can use neuro-stimulation techniques, which involve placing electrodes in certain regions of the brain. Through this, we can modulate brain activity with a very mild current. It can help increase our abilities to verbalise or control emotions. Many of them are non-invasive and absolutely safe. They do not have side effects.
Q. What does your research find about anger?
A. Anger is a very complex emotion. When we started studying it, there were very few studies. Most were on seeing how the brain reacted to anger provocation. This involves participants observing angry facial expressions and we recorded their brain activity. In the beginning, we had a very partial view of this emotion. In the last five years, we have tried to break down this emotion into several components.
There are differences in the way we control anger. Some people are very skilled and good at controlling anger, while others have very poor control or lack of complete control of anger expression. In those cases, you can find pathological manifestations like aggression or outbursts of anger. It can be very detrimental at the interpersonal level.
We have also shown differences between the anger we feel within us and the anger we perceive in others. Both are different because when we feel others’ anger, we may react with fear or counter with anger. It is completely different compared to when we experience anger. All these aspects were not so clear in the scientific literature earlier.
We have run several studies. For example, we have seen that people who are antisocial and face borderline personality disorders express, inhibit and control anger differently.
Q. Under what conditions does anger lead to mental health or interpersonal problems?
A. Externalising or expressing anger is quite good. Anger, although it is considered a negative unpleasant emotion, serves a very good purpose because it can block unfair behaviour from others or establish limits. However, sometimes when we lose control, the externalisation of anger can become pathological because we use not-so-useful and harsh ways to express it like verbal or physical aggression.
Also, internalisation of anger can sometimes be good. But, usually, it is associated with psychopathology, too. This is because we do not express our anger and so we do not regulate other people’s behaviour and interpersonal interactions. As a consequence, we internalise anger and start ruminating about events and people. This increases the arousal of anxiety, rumination and negative thinking inside us. It can be very detrimental.
Unfortunately, when we do not express that anger and suppress our emotions, we tend to experience some physiological signals of stress, like increased blood pressure. This means that by inhibiting or suppressing this emotion, we have a side effect. This can be then related to, or causing, functional disorders like unexplained physical pain or muscle pain because we are redirecting the anger inside us.
Q. What about people who are prone to getting angry?
A. We call that trait anger. There is some indirect evidence that people who are prone to experiencing anger very frequently in their daily life, also face medical pathologies like heart attack risk or blood pressure. So, yes, it seems that they are connected.
Q. What about extreme anger? How angry is too extreme?
A. There is no clear boundary between anger and extreme anger and other manifestations in science. For our understanding, extreme anger can take the form of aggression in physical or verbal form. Extreme anger can be strongly associated with this kind of outburst of anger. For example, antisocial, narcissistic personalities show outbursts of anger when they get frustrated or humiliated.
Extreme anger can also be expressed or it can manifest itself in the form of hate. Hate is usually considered connected with extreme anger, but more at the cognitive level, when anger becomes more like a thinking process of hating someone. So, these are the two destinies that extreme anger can take.
Q. You also talked about anger perception and experience. Why is it important to study these aspects?
A. We believe it is very important because they refer to different phenomena. When we began studying anger, colleagues pointed out that when you are processing anger, some regions are activated in the brain. But anger is a very complicated and a very multifaceted emotion. We did a study after reviewing all the neuro-imaging studies on anger. That is when we realised that two separate phenomena were combined in the literature, creating confusion.
One is anger perception. This happens when we perceive someone as looking angry from their facial expression or bodily movement. Second is anger experience, after anger was provoked in participants. We realised that there were two completely different phenomena. So, that is why we kept them as two categories. For example, during anger perception, there was activation in the fusiform face area because it was connected with facial bodily expression and also in the inferior frontal gyrus, the amygdala,and the superior temporal gyrus. It is notable that the amygdala is connected with emotions.
Whereas when we analyse the anger experience, when subjects that were feeling anger and not perceiving anger in others, we saw activations in the insula (which is associated with anger reactions and also with the arousal of anger) and also in the orbital frontal cortex (which is specialised in the anger reaction and in externalising or expressing anger). This was the first proof that anger can be broken down into sub-components. Otherwise, if we put them together, we get a confused picture.
Q. Do we have enough data on whether suppression of anger is associated with guilt, anxiety and depression?
A. We do not have a lot of data, but we have very good clinical observations and considerations. I am a neuroscientist and also a psychotherapist. In psychotherapy, we know that sometimes at the developmental level, because of societal or family problems, like education, conditioning, excessive punishment or inhibition of our anger expression, you try to inhibit the excessive expression of anger.
There are also some genetic or temperamental differences. For example, people developing personality disorders usually have excessive anger reactions from birth, from the beginning.
(as told to Rohini Krishnamurthy)
This is the fifteenth of an 18-part series.
This was first published as part of the cover story of the 16-31 May, 2024 Print edition of Down To Earth