이 글은 누스바움의 『분노와 용서』의 중심 주제인 분노에 관하여 고찰하고 분노에 관한 누스바움의 분석에서 배제된 분노의 윤리적 의미를 찾으려는 시도이다. 누스바움은 분노를 부정적 감정이라 본다. 그는 분노가 부정적인 감정인 이유를 규범 윤리의 입장에서 분석하고 분노를 제거해야 한다고 주장한다. 나는 누스바움의 분석이 설득력이 있다고 생각하지만 일면 그가 배제하고 있는 감정 그 자체로서의 분노가 주체와의 관계에서 다른 작용을 할 수 있다고 본다. 그런 이유에서 누스바움과 다른 입장의 논의들을 살펴보기 위해 아리스토텔레스의 분노에 관한 논점을 분석한다. 또 ‘자기 배려 윤리’의 논점에서 분노를 재해석하여 분노가 (...) 윤리적 질료로 가치가 있음을 보일 것이다. 이를 위해 푸코가 해석한 세네카의 분노론을 분석하고 푸코가 포착한 세네카의 분노에 대한 다른 논점들이 무엇인지 조명할 것이다. 이를 바탕으로 분노가 자기 배려 주체에게 윤리적 질료로서 의미가 있음을 보이고, 자기 배려주체에게 윤리적 힘을 키우게 하는 주된 계기로 분노의 의의를 재발견할 수 있음을 논구한다. (shrink)

The article proposes that managers can counteract and/or prevent the detrimental effects of destructive anger by cultivating the virtue of humility. Traditional psychological conceptualisations of anger are examined, a need for a novel approach to understanding the origins of this emotion is highlighted, and the recently introduced concept of self-immanent pride is reviewed. The first contribution of the article delves into how destructive managerial anger stems from self-immanent pride leading to negative workplace outcomes. The second (...) contribution proposes a shift from reacting to anger to adopting a proactive approach that emphasises nurturing managerial humility. The third contribution offers practical suggestions, highlighting the importance of self-reflection for understanding how self-immanent pride leads to anger. The article considers boundary conditions and recommends future avenues for research into anger, pride and humility from an ethical perspective. (shrink)

I argue in this paper that the work of Keith Lehrer, especially in his book Self-Trust has applications to feminist ethics; specifically care ethics, which has become the leading form of normative sentimentalist ethics. I extend Lehrer's ideas concerning reason and justification of belief beyond what he says by applying the notion of evaluation central to his account of acceptance to the need for evaluation of emotions. The inability to evaluate and attain justification of one's emotions is an epistemic (...) failure that leads one not to act on one's own aspirations and desires and treat those desires as if they did not exist. I argue that this is a common condition among women in patriarchal societies because patriarchy can cause women to believe that they are not worthy of their trust concerning what they accept, specifically acceptance of their anger over their own mistreatment. As a result, many women are unable to realize the self-protective role of their anger. All of this reflects a lack of what I shall call epistemic personhood, a concept based on Lehrer's theory concerning the keystone role of self-trust in the epistemic arch of rationality, justification and knowledge. Lastly, I use this concept of epistemic personhood to develop a care ethical account of self-respect that counters the Kantian account. (shrink)

Drawing on recent research in the philosophy of the emotions and empirical evidence from social psychology, this paper argues that the concept of loss of self-control at common law mischaracterises the relationship between the emotions and their effects on action. Emotions do not undermine reason in the ways offenders describe ; nor do they compel people to act in ways they cannot control. As such, the idea of ‘loss of self-control’ is an inaccurate and misleading description of the (...) psychological mechanisms at play in cases of emotionally motivated killing, where there may not be any ‘loss of self-control’ as such. (shrink)

The present study was designed to verify hypothesized predictor effects for five anger-related variables, i.e. trait anger, anger expression-out, anger expression-in, anger control-out, and anger-control-in. A sample of 138 students completed measures for FFM personality traits, self-esteem, shyness, and anger. The study confirmed the effects of neuroticism and agreeableness as being the chief personality predictors of anger; however, for the domain of anger expression-in, an unexpected role of extraversion was revealed. (...) Furthermore, introducing self-esteem and shyness changed some effects of FFM traits. Entering self-esteem as an additional predictor improved the predictability of anger control-in. Additionally, a mediation effect of shyness was revealed for the relation between extraversion and anger expression-in. (shrink)

Luminaries like Martin Luther King, Jr. urge that Black Americans love even those who hate them. This can look like a rejection of anger at racial injustice. We see this rejection, too, in the growing trend of characterizing social justice movements as radical hate groups, and people who get angry at injustice as bitter and unloving. Philosophers like Martha Nussbaum argue that anger is backward-looking, status focused, and retributive. Citing the life of the Prodigal Son, the victims of (...) the Charleston Church shooting, Gandhi, and King, she claims that we should choose love instead of anger – not only in our intimate relationships but also in the political realm. Buddhist monk and scholar, Śāntideva, argued that anger is an obstacle to love. Anger leads to suffering. Love frees us from suffering. All this makes an initially compelling case against anger at racial injustice. In addition, although philosophers Jeffrie Murphy and Antti Kauppinen argue that anger communicates self-respect and valuing, respectively––they make no connection between agape love and anger. In this essay I’ll show that the love King and others have in mind––agape love––is not only compatible with anger at hateful racists and complicit others, but finds valuable expression in such anger. (shrink)

This paper considers an allegation by M. Stocker and E. Hegeman that Aristotle’s account of anger yields a narcissistic passion bedevilled by illusions of self-sufficiency. The paper argues on behalf of Aristotle’s valuing of anger within a virtuous and flourishing life, showing that and why Aristotle’s account is neither narcissistic nor involves illusions of self-sufficiency. In so arguing a deeper appreciation of Aristotle’s understanding of a self-sufficient life is reached, as are some interesting contrasts between (...) Aristotle's understanding of anger, its connections to value and our own understanding of these matters. (shrink)

In this volume based on her 2014 Locke Lectures, Martha C. Nussbaum provides a bracing new view that strips the notion of forgiveness down to its Judeo-Christian roots, where it was structured by the moral relationship between a score-keeping God and penitent, self-abasing, and erring mortals.

It is widely acknowledged that susceptibility to suitable emotional responses is part of what it is to value something. Indeed, the value of at least some things calls for such emotional responses – if we lack them, we don’t respond appropriately to their value. In this paper, I argue that susceptibility to anger is an essential component of valuing other people, ourselves, and our relationships. The main reason is that various modes of valuing, such as respect, self-respect, and (...) love, ground normative expectations towards others and ourselves. And holding someone accountable for violating legitimate normative expectations involves emotions from the anger family, such as resentment and indignation. I hold that such forms of anger, which aim at getting the target to conform to expectations or lower their unduly elevated status, are neither inherently problematic or dispensable parts of the package of attitudes involved in valuing. Finally, thinking about anger’s role in valuing also helps see when it is out of place or immature – roughly, it is often excessive, because we easily exaggerate the magnitude of the value involved, the harm or threat to it, or the degree of the target’s moral responsibility. (shrink)

Due to the potent role of teachers’ emotion regulation in effective teaching, it seems essential to see how emotion regulation can contribute to other relevant teaching constructs. In this regard, the present study is intended to probe into the causal relationship among teacher emotion regulation, self-efficacy beliefs, engagement, and anger. In so doing, the Language Teacher Emotion Regulation Inventory, The Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale, The Engaged Teacher Scale, and The Teacher Anger Scale were administered to 581 (...) English as a Foreign Language teachers in Iran. To gauge the causal relationships among the variables, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling using LISREL 8.80 were conducted. The results indicated that language teacher emotion regulation could positively and significantly predict teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs and engagement at work. Moreover, the influence of language teacher emotion regulation on the teacher’s anger is significantly negative. That is, the stronger emotion regulation is implemented the better teachers can manage their anger. The implications of this study may uncover new prospects for effective teaching, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

This paper considers the place of anger in human development and culture, as discussed by Rousseau inÉmile. It is argued that Rousseau presents anger as intimately associated with imperious self-assertion, and with a representation of others as malign and obstructive. If this pattern of thought and expectation is consolidated, the will to dominate these supposedly obstructive others becomes the central preoccupation. The madness lies in the idea contained in this that failure in having one's desires satisfied signals (...) a wrong, an abuse one has suffered. Regulation of anger is necessary to achieving a proper sense of our finitude, limitation and a reasoned sense of our dependence on others. (shrink)

This paper considers the place of anger in human development and culture, as discussed by Rousseau inÉmile. It is argued that Rousseau presents anger as intimately associated with imperious self-assertion, and with a representation of others as malign and obstructive. If this pattern of thought and expectation is consolidated, the will to dominate these supposedly obstructive others becomes the central preoccupation. The madness lies in the idea contained in this that failure in having one's desires satisfied signals (...) a wrong, an abuse one has suffered. Regulation of anger is necessary to achieving a proper sense of our finitude, limitation and a reasoned sense of our dependence on others. (shrink)

In the current comment, I discuss what is unique about hate in relation to anger and feelings of revenge. It seems that hate can be distinguished from the related emotions anger and feelings of revenge by a difference in focus: Anger focuses on changing/restoring the unjust situation caused by another person, feelings of revenge focus on restoring the self, and hatred focuses on eliminating the hated person/group. Though grounded in existing literature, future research is needed to (...) empirically confirm the unique characteristics of these three emotions. (shrink)

Shun argues that the distinction between first and third person is ill-suited to explain the complexities of anger. In this commentary, I first argue that, while the distinction is not uniquely important in characterizing anger and its variations, it can be distinctively important in illuminating the nature and normative significance of different forms of anger. Indeed, Shun’s own characterizations of anger in the paper seem to presuppose this importance. Secondly, I show that there are two related (...) but distinct ways in which one’s anger is ‘personally involved’: the first concerns how the offence is registered (e.g., whether it is perceived as targeting oneself), and the second concerns one’s emotional uptake of the offence. Lastly, I propose an alternative interpretation of Zhu Xi’s distinction between anger that ‘resides in things’ and anger that ‘resides in the self’, where the emphasis is not on whether anger is an appropriate response to a situation but on whether anger is properly encapsulated. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anger in a Perilous Environment:María LugonesMariana Alessandriin a hundred years, maybe our commonsense beliefs about anger will come from a distinguished line of Women of Color like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and María Lugones, who make a case for listening to our anger instead of stifling it. But our ideas about anger still come from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. Their stories about how (...) class='Hi'>anger works and why it is bad have been dominant throughout history, and they are not kind to angry women in the twenty-first century. They have created a perilous environment for us, existentially speaking, by painting anger as irrational, crazy, and ugly. They have left us no way to handle our anger that does not amount to trying to control, suppress, or eradicate it. In this short paper, I contrast a philosophy of anger left to us by ancient Western philosophy with a contemporary one offered by Latina feminist María Lugones. Lugones offers a philosophy of anger that assumes it has something to teach us about our perilous environment.1Part I: Anger Seen in the LightPlato compared passions like anger to a hard-to-control, hot-blooded, black-skinned horse that must be reined in by the "charioteer" of reason (Phaedrus, ln. 253E). He thought we should use self-control to contain our anger, and he was not alone. The Roman Stoic Seneca, who described anger similarly, once told a story about Plato getting livid (Potegal and Novaco 9–24). Instead of beating one of his slaves, Plato froze, his hand drawn back in striking position. A friend asked Plato what he was doing. "I am making an angry man expiate his crime," Plato replied (Seneca, De Ira, Book III, section 12). Plato's freezing was his way of acknowledging that rage is weakness. Seneca formulated this scene into a principle: the only appropriate time to express anger is when you are not angry. Otherwise, you are a slave to your emotion. [End Page 23]I became angry during quarantine. I had been promised a year without teaching or administrative responsibility, but everything changed when the schools went remote. Since my kids were home anyway, I decided to home-school them. But I found myself becoming angry almost daily, and it was upsetting. To make sense of it, I went back to my philosophical sources.I consulted Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher whose Handbook I used to read every year. For the fifteenth time, he told me that "an uneducated man blames others; a partially educated man blames himself. A fully educated man blames no one" (13). While I could not control my circumstances in 2020—Epictetus granted that I did not have the power to end a pandemic or reopen schools—I could control my bursts of anger. Instead of blaming my spouse and kids for my troubles, I should blame myself for expecting life to be easier. Better yet, I should blame no one and accept the new normal gracefully. I also reread the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the second-century Roman emperor and Stoic who believed that yielding to anger is a sign of weakness (Potegal and Novaco 16). Marcus reformulated one of the central tenets of Stoicism: "Disturbance comes only from within—from our own perceptions" (38). His advice? Lower your expectations. Remember that the only person you can change is yourself. To that end, expect people to irritate you daily and you will be ready for it (17). For me, that meant remembering that having kids meant having messes. But expecting a mess did not clean the table every night, load or unload the dishwasher, or vacuum the crumb-riddled floor. Marcus did not send his servants to clean my house. So, I left him for Aristotle.Aristotle's soul was not a charioteer with horses, but it was tripartite: feelings, predispositions, active conditions. Feelings are hard to change, Aristotle thought, so let's not waste too much energy trying. Predispositions just name the likelihood of feeling a particular feeling. Both categories matter, but chiefly because self-knowledge is a philosophical virtue. Mostly, Aristotle urged us to cultivate our "active conditions." Forever a... (shrink)

Emotions are an everyday occurrence. Much work has been done into what the point of emotion is and what part emotions might play in our lives. The great impact emotions have on our lives means it’s not surprising that great philosophers have studied them over the centuries. Anger is an emotion that we encounter every day and most of us are very familiar with. Anger is a response to some ‘wrongfully’ inflicted damage to someone or something that one (...) cares about. When this happens, it is natural for us to feel the need for ‘payback. It is generally agreed by most philosophers that this wish for retribution is a key part of feeling anger. If there is no wish for retribution in your mind when you think you experience anger then perhaps you are experiencing grief or some other emotion. Nussbaum states that anger is a central threat to decent human interactions and posits that a necessary component of anger is the wish for retribution. She states that a wish for retribution can occur independently of anger but anger cannot occur independently of a wish for retribution. In this case – we would be feeling different emotion. This paper has two sections; In section One I will discuss in detail Nussbaum’s view, the two concepts of anger she presents: ‘Payback Anger’ and ‘Status Anger’. The former being anger with a retributive element and the latter being where one would react to an insult or wrong with anger in order to ‘put someone back in their place’ so to speak. This is followed by a brief word on why Nussbaum thinks anger might be beneficial in some circumstances. Section Two discusses cases of anger without the retributive element and how Nussbaum might respond to these cases. We will see how we can be angry at something within our circle of concern but simply want an end to the issue such as a war. This may not involve retribution but still generates anger. I discuss how we can be angry at a flatmate or family member but not want retribution. “Self-Retributive anger” comes up as another case where there does not seem to be retribution involved in anger towards the self. I also discuss here what retribution might consist of and how Nussbaum’s view is unclear on this. The conclusion will summarise the objections to Nussbaum’s view and the objections to that view culminating in a request for further empirical research to determine if we can establish the nature of the feeling of anger in humans. (shrink)

This paper explores a phenomenon that we call “justified-but-misdirected anger,” in which one’s anger is grounded in or born from a genuine wrong or injustice but is directed towards an inappropriate target. In particular, we argue that oppressive ideologies that maintain systems of gender, race, and class encourage such misdirection and are thereby self-perpetuating. We engage with two particular examples of such misdirection. The first includes poor white voters who embrace racist and xenophobic politics; they are justified (...) in being angry about their own economic exploitation, but that anger is misdirected in a way that maintains capitalism (which is the appropriate target of their anger). The second includes so-called “incels” who embrace misogyny; they are justified in being angry about unrealistic and unhealthy standards of contemporary masculinity, but that anger is misdirected in a way that maintains patriarchy. One goal of exploring this type of justified-but-misdirected anger is to thread the needle between holding wrongdoers to account while also clearly identifying the oppressive ideologies that influence their actions. (shrink)

In my paper, I argue that a first-person perspective (the perspective of a patient/recipient of an action) pertaining to response analysis is significant in Confucianism given the deeply personal nature of Confucianism. It matters whether oneself or others is the patient of an action because Confucianism as a virtue theory emphasizes self-reflection and reflexivity of one’s response in self-cultivation. Moreover, as an account of role-ethics, Confucianism calls attention to one’s particular relationship with others—one reacts differently in kind, not (...) just in degrees, depending on whether one’s or others’ family is at risk. I also appeal to Thomas Nagel’s framework of objectivity vs subjectivity to help elucidate the Confucian position on the value of an individual’s particular perspective, distinguishing the person who is the patient from other people. Finally, I revisit the mirror and the one body analogy discussed by Shun and highlight their point of impartiality rather than objectivity as implied by Shun. (shrink)

Here I recount my practicum sessions with Albert, a client who struggles with anger outbursts. Since it can be hard to draw a line between a DSM and a non-DSM issue, my first inclination as a practitioner of Logic-Based Therapy (LBT)—and in line with practice boundaries and referral standards affirmed by the National Philosophical Counseling Association (NPCA)—was to refer Albert to a licensed therapist. But since Albert was already seeing a therapist, and since Albert never loses cognizance of what (...) he is doing during an outburst, I proceeded with Albert anyway. I did make it clear, however, that we would not focus directly on past traumas or substance abuse or family dynamics, but simply on his emotional reasoning in and around those times when he feels angry. Ultimately, I found (1) that damnation, can’tstipation, and perfectionism were the chief fallacies nurturing Albert’s tendency for outbursts and (2) that the uplifting philosophy of Spinoza would be especially effective at stoking self-respect, self-control, and metaphysical security (the direct antidotes to these fallacies) in someone like Albert, an informed and committed naturalist and determinist. (shrink)

This dissertation deals with the political uses of anger, focusing on those cases in which anger is mobilized against socially structural forms of injustice (henceforth, “radical anger”). The author provides a philosophical defence of the legitimacy and usefulness of this kind of anger, together with a set of conceptual tools for distinguishing among different instances of anger in the political realm. The text consists of seven chapters, an introduction and a short conclusion. The first chapter (...) offers a genealogy of the pathologization of radical anger, investigating the linguistic and conceptual entanglement of rage and rabies. The following chapter reviews a few cases in which oppressed groups successfully reclaimed radical anger in spite of widespread pathologizing and criminalizing tendencies, drawing mainly from the radical feminist and antiracist traditions. Special attention is also paid to the relationship between anger and violence, as well as to the opportunity for structurally discriminated groups to politically embrace anger. The metaphor of a ballistics of anger is introduced to heuristically distinguish among specific occurrences of political anger. The third chapter outlines the essential features of a political philosophy of radical anger, starting from a re-reading of Michel Foucault’s interpretation of ancient Cynicism which emphasises the angry character of the latter. After asking whether radical anger can be considered philosophically true and reactionary anger defined as untrue, three possible arguments in favour of an affirmative answer are considered. Since the first two arguments, based respectively on the works of Rahel Jaeggi and Giorgio Agamben, prove unsuccessful, a third alternative, relying mainly on the works of Foucault and Hannah Arendt, is proposed by the author. Chapters from 4 to 6 look for contemporary reprises of Cynical anger, proposing a philosophical reading of the lives and works of three figures who angrily confronted several kinds of structural injustice: Valerie Solanas, Malcolm X and Audre Lorde. The dissertation shows that each of them can offer useful additions to the political philosophy of radical anger already sketched. In particular, Solanas can help us thinking the connections between anger, negation, utopia and abolition; X testifies to the importance of the link between radical anger and the notion of care of the self (ἐπιμέλεια ἑαυτοῦ); Lorde allows us to understand the deep implications of the use of radical anger and paves the way for an erotic conception of this feeling. Finally, Chapter 7 presents the international trans-feminist movement Ni Una Menos-Non Una di Meno as an example of the practical and theoretical strengths of radical anger. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetoric and AngerKenneth S. Zagacki and Patrick A. Boleyn-FitzgeraldSince most believe anger can be either good or bad, rhetors face a moral problem of determining when anger is appropriate and when it is not. They face a corresponding rhetorical problem in deciding when and how to express anger and determining the role that it might play in public discourse, with specific audiences and in particular rhetorical (...) situations. Rhetorical scholars have catalogued whole genres of angry rhetoric—apocalyptic genres, jeremiads, the demonizing rhetoric of religious and political leaders—wherein the rhetorical display of anger is explained in terms of situational conventions and cultural norms.1 Yet these scholars have not easily resolved the moral problems associated with angry rhetoric. Aristotle suggested the earliest and most obvious solutions to these problems. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he outlines a typology for discerning the moral limits of anger and, by implication, angry rhetoric. And in Book II of the Rhetoric he asserts that the orator needs to know the structure of emotions like anger and how to intensify and dissipate them. Or, in other words, the orator must know how to make it reasonable to be angry. Some contemporary philosophers have gone further, suggesting that a failure to feel and express anger in public betrays an insufficient concern for justice and self respect.In this essay, we follow Aristotle in arguing that anger is sometimes the emotion we expect people to feel or the rhetorical response we expect them to display and evoke in others. But we also challenge part of Aristotle's argument by asking: "Even when angry rhetoric would appear to be a reasonable, morally appropriate response, is there a way in which rhetors might manage anger in their public discourse in order to achieve ends which are both morally and pragmatically productive?" The answer, we propose, lies in what we call "non-angry" rhetoric, which involves transforming and reflecting upon anger in public discourse. Because such rhetoric often promotes noble ends such as reconciliation and forgiveness, it is at least morally permissible and more likely morally virtuous.2 In order to establish these claims, our analysis focuses on the case of Nelson Mandela and his "Address to the Interfaith Commissioning Service for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission."3 In this speech, Mandela, as our [End Page 290] analysis demonstrates, managed anger and turned it into an object of reflection, thereby illustrating what opportunities for reconciliation and democratic deliberation would look like during the difficult period attending the political transition in South Africa in general and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings in particular. His "Address" exemplified a unique moment when the rhetoric and the ethics of anger came together in a public performance. While acknowledging the understandable anger of blacks, Mandela (who may in fact have harbored considerable anger himself) simultaneously suggested that by engendering a less hostile social-political context, in which participants maintained their self-respect without necessarily sacrificing justice, a new democratic community could emerge. This would be a community where, as he described it, individuals began to reconcile with and no longer persecute one another. As Aristotle might explain, the purpose of Mandela's speech was to manage the anger of blacks, so that they would then be able to deliberate properly about the issues before the TRC and about the larger democratic transition. As the philosopher Eugene Garver says, the particular passions Aristotle chooses to explore in the Rhetoric serve a role necessary for the kind of public, political decision making he assigns to rhetoric. These emotions serve to integrate—or segregate, as the case may be—"distinct individuals into a deliberative or judging body, or demos" (1994, 131).What we are recommending, then, is that rhetoric encompasses both considerations of moral desert as well as broader moral concerns. While there are times when individuals seem to deserve our angry rhetoric, it may not be justified from a broader moral perspective, especially when the goal is the good of the state or the community—viz., if angry rhetoric leads to the violent dissolution of democratic community. Ultimately, we argue that the moral constitution of political, deliberative communities must be viewed in terms... (shrink)

Anger is arguably one of the most important emotions in a human being’s life. An array of contemporary studies show that, far from being detrimental, anger can foster one’s self-esteem, improve their social interactions, and even benefit physical and mental health. In his Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume explicitly recognized the importance of anger. And yet, few topics have been so neglected in the Hume scholarship as his account of this passion. The following chapter aims (...) to fill the gap in the literature by showing that Hume’s analysis of anger is worth studying and strictly connected to some of the most intriguing problems in his philosophy. (shrink)

Actual anger response styles during anger encounters may well diverge from self-reported habitual anger response styles, such as anger - in, anger - out, or anger control. Also, the relationship of actual anger response styles to broad personality traits is not well known. We obtained anger self - reports, physiological reactivity (diastolic blood pressure, skin temperature at the forehead, and EMG extensor digitorum), and ratings of facial anger expression, and (...) defined actual anger response style dimensions of “intensity”, “suppression”, “repression”, and “denial” as particular patterns of discrepancies among these responses. A total of 80 female subjects were randomly assigned to a treatment (Tr) and a control (Co) group. Anger was induced through real - life provocations. Compared to Co, Tr subjects showed larger physiological responses and reported more anger. Habitual anger response styles did not predict actual styles, whereas extraversion and neuroticism did. Control subjects scoring low on extraversion or high on neuroticism reacted with high denial, that is, with stronger physiological and behavioural than experiential anger, whereas the opposite pattern of low denial was found for treatment subjects low on extraversion or high on neuroticism. These results suggest that both the particular situation and broad but not narrow personality traits exert an influence on actual anger response styles. (shrink)

In this paper I examine some of the positive epistemic and moral dimensions of anger in Plato’s dialogues. My aim is to show that while Plato is clearly aware that retaliatory anger has negative effects on people’s behavior, the strategy we find in his dialogues is not to eliminate anger altogether; instead, Plato aims to transform or rechannel destructive retaliatory anger into a different, more productive, reformative anger. I argue that this new form of (...) class='Hi'>anger plays a crucial positive role in our intellectual and moral development. In relation to our intellectual development, anger is often part of people’s reactions to the Socratic interrogations and it often helps or hinders attempts to acknowledge one’s ignorance and become motivated to learn. For anger to play a positive role in the context of philosophical conversations, Plato suggests its transformation from being an outward-looking and reactive emotion oriented towards retaliation (refutation), into a mostly inward-looking emotion aimed at ones’ own moral and intellectual reform or self-betterment. In relation to our moral progress, anger is strategically linked both to the control of our appetites and to the virtue of courage, so anger is crucial to the psychology of the good citizen. Concretely, anger is needed both for the development of the right opposition to injustice and greed, and for the formation of an adequate sensitivity to justice. (shrink)

Recent studies have used self-report methods to defend a close associative or causal connection between appraisal and emotion. The present experiments used similar procedures to investigate remembered experiences of reasonable and unreasonable anger and guilt, and of nonemotional other-blame and selfblame. Results suggest that the patterns of appraisal reported for reasonable examples of emotions and for situations where there is a near absence of emotion may be highly similar, but that both may differ significantly from the appraisal profiles (...) reported for unreasonable examples of the same emotions. Further, relevant appraisals were not always identified by participants as the most influential determinants of guilt and anger. These findings demonstrate either that the relationship between certain appraisals and emotions is less consistent than implied in some contemporary versions of appraisal theory, or that there are problems with the validity of existing questionnaire-based measures of the variables in question. (shrink)

The evaluations involved in shame are, intuitively at least, of many different sorts. One feels ashamed when seen by others doing something one would prefer doing alone (social shame). One is ashamed because of one’s ugly nose (shame about permanent traits). One feels ashamed of one’s dishonest behavior (moral shame), etc. The variety of evaluations in shame is striking; and it is even more so if one takes a cross-cultural perspective on this emotion. So the difficulty – the “unity problem” (...) of shame- turns out to be the following: is there a common trait shared by all shame evaluations that will allow us to differentiate these evaluations from those that feature in other negative self-reflexive emotions like anger at oneself or self disappointment? Some progress is perhaps accomplished if we say that, in shame, a given trait or behavior is evaluated as degrading or as revealing one’s lack of worth. Still, even if we agree with this last claim, truth is that these answers are less illuminating than we might wish. A theory of shame should surely further elucidate the aspect of one’s identity relevant for shame, namely, the self of shame. In this connexion, philosophers have referred to “self-esteem,” “self-respect” or the “social self,” significantly disagreeing thus on which aspect of one’s identity is at stake in shame. After critically discussing the different solutions to the problem, we offer our own. Shame, we claim, consists in an awareness of a distinctive inability to discharge a commitment that goes with holding self-relevant values. This conception solves the unity problem while illuminating other aspects of this emotion. (shrink)

Publishers love titles that begin How or Why. Better still, How and Why, combining edification with utility. The target group is that overlap between the self-help audience and the idly curious—which is to say, most of us. And since emotions are very much about self-help and self-harm, they offer rich pickings in a burgeoning market. Flanagan's How to Do things with Emotions is a philosopher's take on moral emotions, the allusion to J. L. Austin's How to Do (...) Things with Words chiming with the self-help milieu. Reviewing cases, Flanagan points out that most scientific work in this field derives from experiments on psychology students, about as unrepresentative a slice of humanity as you could find. For Flanagan, they are too WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) to tell us much about the non-weird majority. To learn to “do emotions better,” he argues, we have to look farther afield. Although the emotional lives of cultural others are surely different from those taking Psychology 101, at some functional level they might be similar. Work out the conceptual logic and practical rationale of culturally elaborated emotions—Minangkabau “shame,” Ifaluk “righteous anger,” American “road rage”—and there is scope for comparison. Indeed, anthropology has shown as much, and it is from anthropology that Flanagan takes his cues. To mention two famous cases, what can we learn about anger management from Utku igloo-dwellers and Ilongot headhunters? Mutually dependent for survival in their snowy isolation, the Utku cannot risk getting angry. (They mercilessly tease their children into learning the futility of anger.) In the jungles of Luzon, Ilongot youths cast away their anger in externally directed violence: headhunting as cathartic sport. We can think of parallels closer to home.Flanagan's vigorously argued book, a tour de force of its kind, is both an anatomizing of anger and shame—two moral emotions we tend to “do badly”—and a proposal to “change how we do these emotions.” Indignation is fine, but anger that is vengeful or “pain-passing,” rather than righteous, is irrational and socially harmful. Shame can be incapacitating and cruel (the undeserved burn of a Twitter pile-on). What we need is reflective anger directed at injustice and a “mature sense of shame” that reminds us of the social contract and stops us misbehaving.In its How-and-Why format, the book combines theory and practice, metaethics with moralism. Here is how a prof should do self-help. But if the diagnosis is well made, the remedy is hard to imagine. As Flanagan recognizes, moral sentiments and practices are embedded in intricate forms of life and not readily detachable. Anger Utku-style is not a transferable skill, nor are educative routines forged in social ecologies remote from our own. Lacking serviceable models, Flanagan falls back on the anthropological justification that knowledge of cultural diversity expands our sense of human possibility, of other roads taken. In a globalizing world, difference is its own reward. For me, an anthropologist, that maxim is enough. Yet difference bedevils comparison, jinxing the units, warping criteria. Most languages lack a word for emotion or an equivalent umbrella concept; nor do emotion words translate well across languages. Emotion may be an incoherent notion, or at best a heuristic.Flanagan's use of the WEIRD tag makes things a bit too easy. Does it cover farmhands and factory workers? Are we so democratic, anyway? More damagingly, a typological approach blurs the circumstances of family, community, and biography that define an emotional episode and shape its phenomenology, the way it is felt and experienced—what a violent outburst or fearful exit means in the context of a life. Take Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, who flees a scene of failure and derails his life. It requires a long narrative to unravel the implications of his jumping ship and the paralyzing shame he experiences before the judgment of society. Or consider the scene in Anna Karenina in which the dignified and self-important Karenin, apprised of Anna's adulterous liaison, agonizes over the threat to his existence. To call his response jealousy would not scratch the surface. Characteristically for Tolstoy, the emotions go unnamed. Instead, we witness Karenin's fervid deliberations (emotions involve thoughts), vacillations (emotions have action tendencies), anguished calculations of impending scandal (emotions are appraisals), and bodily changes (emotions are cognized feelings). We shudder at the brutal metaphors through which he grasps his predicament and its cure: like rooting out a bad tooth, he decides. That welter of particularities escapes the theorist who needs clear-cut, comparable units, formulaic instances of jealousy or anger. But what are you left with if you omit the details? What would remain of Karenin's existential crisis?The novelist's privileged access to subjectivity is, of course, unavailable to the scientist, but the larger context of plot and character—a history of relations that gives emotional episodes their shape and power—has its analog in the ethnographic domain. Emotions are public as well as private events, their meanings and effects depending on a fit with social reality, a clash of perspectives. In thought and feeling, we are never really alone. All of which suggests that narrative, fictional or nonfictional, can capture the ongoing moment in a way that eludes other methods. If what we are after is living emotion, it is the movie, not the snapshot, that surely matters. No point in comparing “emotions” no one ever really experienced outside of an experiment.But there's the rub. In generalization—the goal of emotion theory—an emotion's social meaning, personal significance, pragmatic function, and narrative context get stripped out. All that makes it what it is! Even in doggedly empirical anthropology, detailed emotional episodes are rare (Jean Briggs's Utku ethnography Never in Anger, published in 1970, is still unsurpassed). Instead we get recollections and summary examples, lacking the constitutive detail, real-time evolutions, and consequences of the real thing. Yet these must serve for comparison, fodder for countless theoretical speculations. Are we at risk of analyzing faux emotions and building theories on cardboard constructions?An empty Arctic stage, a handful of characters, life simplified to survival: Briggs is a hard act to follow. Bare life does not make for basic emotions. On the white set, emotions prove hard to parse. That gruff hesitation, that flashing glint—are they tokens of anger? Empathy will not suffice. As Briggs shows, narrative context is all. And in our more cluttered emotional worlds, the value of backstory, interwoven biographies, and emotional plots is all the greater. Flanagan is right; we must do emotions better. (shrink)

Losing an intimate other to death belongs to the most uprooting experiences in human life. Not only is it accompanied by a range of negative emotions such as sorrow, longing, anger etc., but profound grief is a limit experience that causes a rupture in the sense of self of the bereaved. This experience is often expressed in identity statements such as ‘I no longer feel like myself’ or ‘I am missing part of myself’. Although such experiences are richly (...) reported in empirical studies on grief and implemented in diagnostic criteria for pathological grief, their experiential meaning is largely left unexplored. In this article, I suggest that being bereaved of an intimate other is self-alienating because our sense of self is a distributed phenomenon relying on daily confirmation through interaction with our habitual environment. When our lives are intertwined with intimate others, this habitual identity become a dyadic structure, relying on a heteronomy. Being bereaved of this intimate other leads to a profound impoverishment of the habituated sense of self, leading to self-alienation. Finally, I discuss the process of returning to a non-alienating state and suggest that this is not exclusively a cognitive process, but equally an embodied process of appropriating a habitual identity. (shrink)

Losing an intimate other to death belongs to the most uprooting experiences in human life. Not only is it accompanied by a range of negative emotions such as sorrow, longing, anger etc., but profound grief is a limit experience that causes a rupture in the sense of self of the bereaved. This experience is often expressed in identity statements such as ‘I no longer feel like myself’ or ‘I am missing part of myself’. Although such experiences are richly (...) reported in empirical studies on grief and implemented in diagnostic criteria for pathological grief, their experiential meaning is largely left unexplored. In this article, I suggest that being bereaved of an intimate other is self-alienating because our sense of self is a distributed phenomenon relying on daily confirmation through interaction with our habitual environment. When our lives are intertwined with intimate others, this habitual identity become a dyadic structure, relying on a heteronomy. Being bereaved of this intimate other leads to a profound impoverishment of the habituated sense of self, leading to self-alienation. Finally, I discuss the process of returning to a non-alienating state and suggest that this is not exclusively a cognitive process, but equally an embodied process of appropriating a habitual identity. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers of moral responsibility are in widespread agreement that we can only be blamed for actions that express, reflect, or disclose something about us or the quality of our wills. In this paper I reject that thesis and argue that self disclosure is not a necessary condition on moral responsibility and blameworthiness: reactive responses ranging from aretaic appraisals all the way to outbursts of anger and resentment can be morally justified even when the blamed agent’s action expresses (...) or discloses nothing significant about his or her “deep self,” judgments and cares, or the quality of his or her will. I argue that the self-disclosure requirement on responsibility overestimates the extent to which our blaming practices and responsibility judgments are responsive to agents as opposed to actions, and that this mistake has the potential to distort both our reactive responses and our understanding of blamed agents’ characters. (shrink)

Self-regulation, especially the regulation of emotion, is an important component of athletic performance. In our study, we tested the effect of a self-distancing strategy on athletes’ performance in an aggression-inducing experimental task in the laboratory. To this end, we modified an established paradigm of interpersonal provocation [Taylor Aggression Paradigm ], which has the potential to complement field studies in order to increase our understanding of effective emotion regulation of athletes in critical situations in competitions. In our experimental setting, (...) we first tested the applicability of the self-distancing perspective and the athletes’ ability to dynamically adapt besides the self-distanced perspective a self-immersed perspective to provocation in the TAP. Secondly, we investigated how this altered perspective modulated regulatory abilities of negative affectivity, anger, and aggression. The experiment consisted of two conditions in which the participant adopted either a self-immersed or a self-distanced perspective. Forty athletes from different team and individual sports with a mean age of 23.83 years competed individually in a reaction-time task against a opponent. Results show that athletes are equally able to adopt both perspectives. In addition, within-person analyses indicate that self-distancing decreased aggressive behavior and negative affect compared to the self-immersed perspective. Our results suggest that self-distancing modulates different levels of athletes’ experience and behavior. Furthermore, this demonstrates the feasibility of testing self-regulation of emotion in athletes in a laboratory setting and allows for further application in research in sports and exercise psychology. (shrink)

Through extensive readings in philosophical, legal, medical, and imaginative writing, this book explores notions and experiences of being a person from European antiquity to Descartes. It offers quite new interpretations of what it was to be a person—to experience who-ness—in other times and places, involving new understandings of knowing, willing, and acting, as well as of political and material life, the play of public and private, passions and emotions. The trajectory the author reveals reaches from the ancient sense of personhood (...) as set in a totality of surroundings inseparable from the person, to an increasing sense of impermeability to the world, in which anger has replaced love in affirming a sense of self. The author develops his analysis through an impressive range of authors, languages, and texts: from Cicero, Seneca, and Galen; through Avicenna, Hildegard of Bingen, and Heloise and Abelard; to Petrarch, Montaigne, and Descartes. (shrink)

Throughout the twentieth century, women's magazines in the United States have socialized their readers to the “proper” expression of love and anger in marriage. Our analysis of a random sample of marital advice articles from 1900 to 1979 examines this cultural convergence of gender, marriage, and emotion. A qualitative analysis identifies techniques for socializing readers to the emotional culture of marriage and shows a historical change toward equating love with self-fulfillment and advocating the expression of anger. A (...) quantitative analysis then specifies the timing of changes in emotion norms and showed an oscillation between modern and traditional norms that is related to waves of political liberation versus oppression. We discuss the relation between emotion norms and behavior and explore the effect of group conflict on the production of emotional culture. Emotion norms have become less rigid and more tolerant of diversity; but gender differences persist, and women are still responsible for maintaining intimate relationships. Historical trends in love and anger norms are nonlinear, not a continuous shift toward individualism, self-development, and free expression, as suggested by recent cultural theories. (shrink)

Ecologically valid procedures for eliciting and measuring children's anger are needed to enhance researchers' theories of children's emotional competence and to guide intervention efforts aimed at reactive aggression. The purpose of this article is to describe a laboratory-based game-playing procedure that has been used successfully to elicit and measure children's anger across observational, physiological, and self-report channels. Steps taken to ensure that participants are treated ethically and fairly are discussed. The article highlights recently published data that emphasize (...) the importance of provoking and assessing children's anger across multiple channels using laboratory-based procedures. Finally, it presents preliminary data that suggest that the safeguards taken to protect children were successful in making both children and their parents feel well treated and comfortable. (shrink)

This study explored attention and interpretation biases in processing facial expressions as correlates of theoretically distinct self-reported anger experience, expression, and control. Non-selected undergraduate students completed cognitive tasks measuring attention bias, interpretation bias, and Spielberger’s State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory. Attention bias toward angry faces was associated with higher trait anger and anger expression and with lower anger control-in and anger control-out. The propensity to quickly interpret ambiguous faces as angry was associated with greater (...) anger expression and its subcomponent of anger expression-out and with lower anger control-out. Interactions between attention and interpretation biases did not contribute to the prediction of any anger component suggesting that attention and interpretation biases may function as distinct mechanisms. Theoretical and possible clinical implications are discussed. (shrink)

The aim of this research was to examine the impact of two specific negative emotions of anger and fear on intergroup attitudes. In Study 1 we measured emotions of anger and fear and in Study 2 we evoked these emotions incidentally, that is independently of any intergroup context. In both studies we measured attitudes towards the ingroup and the outgroup.We expected that fear would lead to more positive ingroup attitudes and anger to more negative outgroup attitudes. The (...) results of the correlational study confirmed the predictions regarding anger and decreased outgroup evaluations, and the experimental study revealed that fear enhanced positivity towards the ingroup, but anger increased negativity towards the outgroup. The impact of fear and anger on social attitudes in the specific context of a negatively self-stereotyped ingroup is discussed. (shrink)

This book aims to pinpoint the connection feelings have with behaviour - a connection that, while clear, has never been fully explained. Following William James, Laird argues that feelings are not the cause of behavior but rather its consequences; the same goes for behaviour and motives and behaviour and attitudes. He presents research into feelings across the spectrum, from anger to joy to fear to romantic love, that support this against-the-grain view. Laird discusses the problem of common sense, (...) class='Hi'>self-perception theory, the association between feelings and higher cognitive processes, and also the literature on facial expression, posture, and gaze. (shrink)

Liberal-Democratic changes in the Russian Society have brought a number of acute problems threatening national security and leading to converting Russia into a peripheral socio-cultural system («national self-identification crisis»). Scientific research shows that the main indicator of the said crisis is not only the critical economic differentiation of people into the «poor» and «rich» Russia (with the different ways of life, needs, mentality) but also spiritual degradation, spread of aggressive – depressive syndrome (growth of hatred, feeling of injustice, loss (...) of meaning of the life, anger, melancholy, hopelessness, loneliness etc.). Twothirds of the citizens (74.9%) interviewed in 2006 think that their social status does not correspond to their personal achievements in education and professional abilities. One of the main reasons of their distrust towards the government bodies is insufficient professional and cultural level, absence of unity of a word and business. It is worth mentioning that books and articles of scientists and ideologists who resist Western liberalism are freely published, but you can hardly see these people close to the President. Russians are openly and secretly under pressure of ideas propagandizing negative past which undermine national self-identification, national pride for the great history of their country. The original sphere of influence of Russian language and Russian culture is shortening under the press of mass-culture. Meanwhile, 67% of Russians expressed their negative attitude towards massive Western cultural expansion. The Futureof Russia is in safeguarding national intellectual and spiritual values, Science, education and in supporting the person of work and creativity. (shrink)

Research programs regularly compete to achieve the same goal, such as the discovery of the structure of DNA or the construction of a TEA laser. The more the competing programs share information, the faster the goal is likely to be reached, to society’s benefit. But the “priority rule”-the scientific norm according to which the first program to reach the goal in question must receive all the credit for the achievement-provides a powerful disincentive for programs to share information. How, then, is (...) the clash between social and individual interest resolved in scientific practice? This chapter investigates what Robert Merton called science’s “communist” norm, which mandates universal sharing of knowledge, and uses mathematical models of discovery to argue that a communist regime may be on the whole advantageous and fair to all parties, and so might be implemented by a social contract that all scientists would be willing to sign. (shrink)

As with certain other self-reflexive emotions, such as guilt and shame, our understanding of self-hatred may be aided by views of the mind which posit an internalized other whose perspective on oneself embodies and focuses a set of concerns and values, and whose perspective one is in some sense vulnerable to. To feel guilt for some transgression is not solely to feel the anger that one would feel toward another’s trespasses, now directed back onto oneself as an (...) object of that anger; it is at the same time to react to that anger – perhaps, for example, to accept it as deserved, or to welcome the lashing of one’s bad conscience. To feel shame before oneself is not just to see oneself in some compromising way, it is to feel compromised by one’s own gaze. Likewise, the person who hates herself does not feel the hatred that she might have for another, simply taking herself as object of that attitude. She is not merely the seat of an internalized hostile voice and perspective that she may, for example, react to with indifference. She does not only tell herself that she is “worthless” but, will typically feel herself so in response. And her suffering may not just result from pain she is inclined to inflict, but suffering that, in some sense, she is inclined to suffer. But how is this so? How, in self-hatred, does one become not only subject to, but vulnerable and even receptive to one’s own hostility? (shrink)

The impossibility results of Bovens and Hartmann (2003) and Olsson (2005) call into question the strength of the connection between coherence and truth. As part of the inquiry into this alleged link, I define a notion of degree of truth-conduciveness, relevant for measuring the usefulness of coherence measures as rules-of-thumb for assigning probabilities in situations of partial knowledge. I use the concept to compare the viability of some of the measures of coherence that have been suggested so far under different (...) circumstances. It turns out that all of these, including the prior, are just about equally good in cases of very little knowledge. Nevertheless, there are differences in when they are applicable, and they also depart more from each other when more knowledge is added. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)