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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 thirteenth part, DTE speaks to Olga M Klimecki, a psychologist, neuroscientist and senior researcher at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Olga’s work on neural mechanisms showed that a particular brain region could be involved in controlling anger.
Q. How has our understanding of anger evolved over the years?
A. I study brain regions that are more related to the emotional component of feeling anger. Understanding what happens in the brain sometimes informs us about the potential biological and psycho-biological mechanisms. Sometimes it can inform us more than self-reports, which might be biased due to an individual’s social desirability.
Initially, when I started this research, I thought anger was a destructive emotion. However, I was surprised to find that anger is not always related to antisocial behaviour. So, I looked more into the literature on anger. I found anger in conflicts can be constructive or destructive. It depends on how anger is used. While this emotion can motivate destructive and harmful behaviour, it can also motivate behaviour to restore justice.
Anger is associated with this feeling that we are in control and that we can change the situation. So, anger can be very constructive for conflict resolution, depending on how it is used.
A main contribution to the view on anger is research in conflict-related areas. There has been research on different emotions in conflict. We know now, for instance, that hatred is a very bad emotion. In hatred, you assume the other person or group is inherently bad and never going to change. This is different from anger. In anger you assume the other person has done something bad, or the other group has done something bad. So it is more focused on the action. In anger, you still feel in control of the situation and you have this evaluation of the situation that it can change. So, anger is far less destructive than hatred.
By doing research on emotions and the relation between different emotions and different behavioural outcomes, we can better understand how specific emotions are related to behaviour that promotes the resolution of conflict and reconciliation.
Q. How do scientists induce anger in the laboratory?
A. A lot of the studies showed pictures of angry faces, and seeing an angry face could, for instance, induce fear. So, the brain activation they might measure might be fear. You might feel anger when you see an angry face, but that is not necessarily true.
Some of the better studies used some kind of behavioural manipulation. Then, some studies are script-based, where participants are asked to remember an event where they felt angry, or they are told to imagine an event where they could feel angry. I think, the problem with imagining events is that some people imagine events very well. Also, the events you might imagine might be very different from those that I might imagine. So, it is hard to standardise the situation and measure a kind of common brain activity.
In my study, I tried to induce relatively real anger without necessarily harming the participants. I constructed an economic interactive paradigm, where participants interacted with two other people—one fair and one unfair person. Anger was induced through the unfair behaviour. We measured anger using the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, a type of fMRI scan that can show which areas of your brain are most active. But this is difficult to do because we create an artificial environment and it is difficult to induce a real-life anger-provoking situation while a person has to lie still and cannot move more than 3 mm. The experiment lasts usually about half-an-hour, sometimes, up to an hour, for an individual.
Q. You argue that aggression, and not anger, involves causing harm to others. Does anger not do that as well, in certain situations?
A. Not necessarily. Anger has the primary intention of changing a situation. People usually feel anger when they encounter something unfair and they feel they can do something about it. Anger comes with the motivation to change things for the better, to restore fairness.
Restoring fairness can be done by causing harm to others, maybe. It is debatable. I do not subscribe to that. But some people do think that causing harm to others can help restore fairness. But this can also be achieved by peaceful negotiations.
Aggression, however, is a destructive behavioural tendency, and, therefore, is different from anger. Sometimes anger and aggression are linked, and at other times, they are not. This, I think, is a key differentiation between anger, which is the emotion, and aggression, which is the behaviour.
Q. Do anger and aggression activate different portions of the brain?
A. In the scanner, I deliberately provoke anger in participants by exposing them to unfair behaviour. At another time in the scanner, I induce aggression. Then I looked at the brain activations while they were being provoked (associated with anger) and while they were choosing antisocial actions (aggression).
When they were being provoked, we saw activations in a brain region called the amygdala. So, this is a brain region associated with the detection of relevance. So, probably when they were angry, the unfair behaviour of the other seemed more important to them. We also saw stronger activations in parts of the temporal cortex and parts of the fusiform cortex. The temporal cortex indicates what happened in cognitive terms. The fusiform cortex is in the back of the brain, which processes visual information related to faces. So, probably the stimulus was more relevant to them and they paid more attention to the face.
Then, when they decided to behave, maybe, unfairly, we saw more activation in parts of the posterior cingulate cortex. It is an area often related to self-referential thought, mind-wandering and rumination. So, maybe, they were thinking that this person has been unjust to me in the past.
Q. Do we clearly understand which regions of the brain help control or regulate anger?
A. On a biological level, we have some insights. But we have not fully understood it. One aspect that emerged from my study is the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which is the area of the brain situated behind our temple. It is important to control emotions or thoughts and to also control behaviour.
We see from my experiments that when participants have more activation in DLPFC, the brain area that controls emotions and regulates emotions, they are less aggressive later. So, it seems that controlling your emotions during provocation is associated with less aggression. But we need more studies. We need studies that manipulate DLPFC. My study is the first to show that there is a relationship between anger control and DLPFC, but then we need more studies to establish the causality of these different mechanisms.
Q. Do we understand why activation of DLPFC could lead to a reduction in antisocial behaviour later on?
A. We do not directly understand it. I think, the new hypothesis we could deduct from this experiment, which has to be tested, is that if people regulate their emotions during provocation, it might impact their behaviour later on. We know from other experiments that emotion regulation can reduce antisocial behaviour and increase pro-social behaviour. But it should be tested to establish the causality of it because this was not a randomised controlled trial.
Q. How can scientists manipulate the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity?
A. In theory, this brain region can be manipulated in different ways. It can be manipulated through feedback, when participants are lying in the scanner, they learn how to control their anger. Or you can do it externally, by applying a current that down-regulates or up-regulates certain brain activities. I do not engage in these experiments personally, but other groups do. To show the causality, it might be interesting to do these kinds of experiments.
(as told to Rohini Krishnamurthy)
This is the fourteenth 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