The measurement of the emotion of anger

• Main Author: Cox, Kenneth James
• Language: en_US
• Published: Boston University 2013
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/2144/5132

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University === This thesis has had as its purpose the study of the measurement of the emotion of anger. Its method is that of an examination, evaluation and summarization of all scientific studies in the experimental psychology of anger. It sources will be the recognized journals of psychology plus the writer's own research. It assumers as a postulate for the thesis that measurement is the most exact description of physical phenomena by the method of comparison to a fixed and known quantity. It defines emotion as a configuration of feeling tones arising out of the disturbed functioning of the viscera and glands, plus an overt set of behaviour patterns which show a stirred up state of the organism plus a lack of ability on the part of the individual to handle the situation in accordance with his known intellectual capabilities. Anger is best described as the emotion arising out of the thwarting of the personality, desires, and purposes. Physiologically, anger results from the functioning of the thoracic-lumbar section of the autonomic nervous system; it is correlated in its functioning with the emotion of fear, and is antagonism functionally, with the emotions of sex and hunger. Psychologically, anger is described as an emotion that arises only when there is a fair margin of safety on the part of the individual in gaining his purpose by such overt behaviors. Introspectively, anger is unpleasant. Anger may express itself subjectively, and by fantasy of repression and in so doing, it has its psychoanlytical phases. Genetically, anger arises in early infancy, and with experience changes, and is modified into socialized behaviour. Anger has its abnormal psychology in the individual who cannot get angry, in the irritable person, in the person who has temper tantrums, in the individual who holds a grudge for a long time, and finally in the paranoic who believes everyone is persecuting him. On the theoretical side, anger may arouse from the disturbed viscera or muscies or from the passage of stimuli through the thalamus. Anger may possibly be differentiated from the other emotions by the sensations arising from its expression.