NCJ Number
125631
Date Published
1989
Length
22 pages
Annotation
As an affective disturbance, anger is significantly involved in many psychiatric disorders but, unlike anxiety and depression, it has no formal classification.
Abstract
While anxiety and depression are clinical conditions, anger is an emotion with no automatic status as a problem. Viewing anger as a passion separates it from the intellect and sees only its disturbing qualities. Anger does have disruptive, instigational, and other maladaptive effects, but it also has energizing, expressive, and discriminate functions. Although harmful behavior toward others is clearly a serious risk when anger becomes intense, the more common problems associated with chronic anger involve impairments to one's psychological and physical well-being. In addition, cognitive mediation of anger is understood too often as an intermediary process between exposure to a stimulus and resulting physiological and behavioral reactions. An information processing perspective on anger provocation is presented in which comparison and decision processes can be influenced by stimulus context and prior knowledge by at least three strategies: selectively activating certain categories in memory through priming from the environment or through internal processes; limiting comparisons to selected domains of categories in classifying the stimulus; and biasing the decision process such that a particular category is selected to represent the stimulus despite a lack of confirming sensory evidence. Cognitive processing that is predisposed to anger and aggression can be viewed in terms of five information processing biases: attentional cueing, perceptual matching, attribution error, false consensus, and anchoring effects. 60 references.