Anger is a physiological, emotional response when an individual feels threatened, or when one’s space, relatives and properties get violated. It is a normal emotion experienced by all individuals acting as an alarm to warn people when something seems wrong.
The body’s reaction to anger depends on the intensity of the emotion. In the case of an anger burst, the brain triggers the release of adrenaline that leads to increased heart rate and blood pressure. Additionally, the body muscles tighten in readiness for a reaction like a fight or flight. People tend to express anger in different ways and that defines their behaviors when angry. Some people’s faces flush red, they may raise their voices, clamp their fists, bang doors or even storm out of the places where the emotion took over. Others may start yelling, pacing around, insulting or even demanding for explanations and apologies.
In theory, evolution of anger has come about through natural selection to an unconscious feeling of emotion in response to numerous conflicts man has come across in his evolutionary journey. An individual with greater bargaining power in all aspects of life has a higher capacity to experience angry emotions. The tendency of man over the years to resolve conflicts by wars is clear supporting evidence to this notion. Anger has evolved with the evolving threats to man’s strengths and properties. The evolution takes in perspective how beneficial a certain trait or emotion will benefit the individual in the aim for survival, maximizing the likelihood that such genes get passed to the progenies. That in turn results to generations with adaptive behaviors over the years.
Anger is also a product of the social world being affected by the cultures of individuals. The responses to varying situations trigger many emotions. Most responses in terms of emotions have been found to get influenced by the cultures around the individuals experiencing them. Influence on anger can be by how a certain culture stipulates the response on a certain issue that makes one angry. Social consequences to some manifestations of anger have led to many people in such a community to adapt ways of expressing the emotion or completely suppressing it. If a response, for example, is punishable in a society, people tend to try and suppress this response and subsequently, it is rarely noted among individuals of such a society.
The cultural perspective provides a better understanding of anger as the society tends to be very specific on certain anger responses. The suppression of anger responses as a result of the consequential punishment after the expression has led to some responses becoming difficult to observe. The individuals are forced to express their anger in ways acceptable to a society making some reactions rare. The cultural perspective of anger in a greater sense has contributed to the different anger reactions on people from different social settings. People who come from a society that cares little about how others react to certain emotions tend to express some reactions more violently than those in very conservative societies. People in positions of influence tend to control their emotions better compared to those in normal life without tasking public responsibilities.
Having studied the above, I can conclude that anger is a very adaptive emotion. It gets influenced by a lot of the happenings around an individual’s life. The individual’s behavioral responses to anger vary depending on their setting. People’s anger bursts and responses to anger bursts are greatly influenced by their conscious mind. It, therefore, results to individuals behaving differently when angry at different settings, ages and level of respect in the societies.
