My neighbor describes a family crisis that she watched unfold on her patio. A baby bird, struggling from its nest, has made its way to a precarious perch on her clothesline. Terrified equally of flying and falling, it does not budge, but whimpers piteously. The mother, chirping her support and encouragement, shows her baby how to take off, flutter around, and land. No luck; baby doesn't move. The mother becomes chirpier. No reaction. She flies off, leaving baby in panic. Suddenly, from a nearby tree, comes an angry, unmistakable paternal note, a deep squawk: FLY! Baby stops whining at once and soars away.

The Bird Family scene seems so familiar to us that it is almost impossible to describe it without using anthropomorphic terms: The fledgling is "terrified," "panics," and "whines"; the mother "encourages," the father remonstrates sternly. Charles Darwin, for all his powers of observation, likewise had no difficulty in seeing human emotions in the animals he studied. In Descent of Man, he wrote that animals feel pride, self-complacency, shame, modesty, magnanimity, boredom, wonder, curiosity, jealousy, and anger — in short, all the blights and delights of the human species. "There can, I think, be no doubt that a dog feels shame, as distinct from fear, and something very like modesty when begging too often for food," Darwin wrote. (He was talking about dogs that live with people.) And one day, while walking in the zoological gardens, he observed a baboon "who always got into a furious rage when his keeper took out a letter or book and read it aloud to him; and his rage was so violent that, as I witnessed on one occasion, he bit his own leg till the blood flowed." One wonders what the keeper was reading... and why he persisted.

Darwin's purpose, however, was not to equate people with baboons, in spite of what we call each other in the heat of anger, but rather to demonstrate that the origins of virtually all the human emotions could be found in lower animals. Emotional expression, he said, serves the same adaptive purpose. The smile, the frown, the grimace, the glare: all were biologically based, common to many animal species through the course of evolution. Darwin sought to establish a theory that applied to human beings and to other species, and in so doing he significantly tipped the balance between reason and rage in favor of the latter.

When animals are threatened or perceive danger, they do respond in ways that we liken to anger: Hair (if the animal has hair) stands on end, pupils dilate, muscles tense, fins flap, warning growls or chirps or rattles sound, and the organism readies itself to fight or flee. When provoked by another stickleback, a male stickleback must attack, for it is programmed to be a feisty fish. If a foreign wolf enters marked territory, the defending wolf is not going to be laid-back about it. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, written in 1872, Darwin argued that rage is a simple response to threat, which requires an animal to become aroused to defend itself. In fact, Darwin actually defined rage as the motivation to retaliate: "Unless an animal does thus act, or has the intention, or at least the desire to attack its enemy, it cannot properly be said to be enraged."

Because human beings so often seem to behave like stickle-backs, baby birds, and wolves, it seemed logical to conclude that the rage response is as programmed into us as into other species. Indeed, as Darwin's stringers in India, New Zealand, China, Australia, and Europe assured him, the symptoms of rage are identical in people throughout the world. The face of rage, for example, is not learned. It is as much a part of species equipment as a nose or a pair of eyebrows.

So far, so good, but then Darwin made a crucial error. Anger, he decided, was only watered-down rage. Anger and indignation "differ from rage only in degree," he said, "and there is no marked distinction in their characteristic signs." By lumping these three feelings together, however, Darwin severely restricted his analysis, for he was led to conclude that anger, like rage, is solely a response to threat and danger; and that anger, like rage, implies an instinctive aggressive response.

Darwin was a brilliant ethologist, but a poor psychologist. He had animal rage down cold, but human anger eluded him. His account of anger was oversimplified: Someone offends you, so you dislike him; your dislike turns to hatred; brooding over your hatred makes you angry. This progression of events is certainly possible, but by no means inevitable, or the only origin of anger. (Maybe it occurs the other way around for you: You hate someone's values, and therefore dislike the person; your dislike turns to anger; your anger causes him to offend you.) Further, it seems that Darwin did not have to deal with inept bank tellers and surly checkout clerks, for he assumed that "if the offending person be quite insignificant, we experience merely disdain or contempt." And he shared the delusion of his social class that a subordinate would never dare get angry with a superior: If the offending person is "all-powerful, then hatred passes into terror, as when a slave thinks about a cruel master." Clearly Darwin had never been a slave.

Because Darwin was interested in exploring the exciting similarities between humans and other animals, he understandably overlooked the differences. But in the case of anger, the differences are essential. The human symbolic ability and our enormously elastic capacity for learning give us a far greater range of choices than lower animals have. Human anger is not a biological reflex like the sneeze, nor simply a reactive display designed to ward off enemies. You may become roused to anger by memories and symbols as well as by real and present dangers, and you can maintain that anger for years. You may even decide retrospectively to get angry, which is the "more I thought about it, the madder I got" phenomenon. Beagles, in contrast, will know by your angry voice that you are displeased with them or about to punish them, but they will not bite you if you insult their intelligence or ancestors.

Further, human beings are able to lie. We can hide an emotional state if we choose to; and often, as on first dates and job interviews, we choose to. We can act as if we are caught in the throes of an emotion when we really feel quite cool; and often, when we feel obliged to show anger, sadness, or even sexual interest, we play a part. This ability is unique to us. A pouter pigeon's swagger reflects its biology, not its braggadocio. When a rabbit is afraid, it does not whistle a happy tune. But people know how to play angry for effect — as a lawyer does during a trial, to shake up a witness; as an assertive customer does to get action from a shopkeeper.

Modern psychologists have supported Darwin's idea that extreme emotions — great joy, rage, disgust, fear — are registered on the face, and that these facial expressions are universally recognized (and therefore biologically wired in). We should be happy for this bit of adaptive advantage, too, these researchers add, because it means we will always be able to tell whether a stranger is happy or about to attack us in a fury. However, the emotions they are talking about are, again, extremes. When most of us are angry we do not go around frowning, growling, and clenching our teeth, and when we are sad we do not necessarily continue weeping for days; we do not necessarily weep. A Japanese is expected to smile and be polite even if seething inside; a Kiowa Indian woman is supposed to scream and tear her face at a brother's death, even if she never liked him. Cultural masks overlay the face of emotion.

The idea that our emotions are instinctive has suggested, to some modern writers, that they cannot be controlled; no use trying to suppress your fury, this view runs, for the body will out. But Darwin himself would have disagreed, strongly. "The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it," he wrote. "On the other hand, the repression, as far as this is possible, of all outward signs softens our emotions. He who gives way to violent gestures will increase his rage; he who does not control the signs of fear will experience fear in a greater degree." But self-control, especially self-control in the pursuit of emotional restraint, is a human choice, beyond the limitations of instinct.

By equating anger with aggression, Darwin committed the fallacy of the Swami's snake. In human beings, this link is by no means inevitable. You may feel angry and express it in hundreds of ways, many of which will be neutral or even beneficial (cleaning the house in an energetic fury, playing the piano forte, organizing a political protest movement) instead of violent. Conversely, you can act aggressively without feeling angry at all, as a professional assassin or soldier does, as an employer who fires a competitive subordinate does. The very term "murder in cold blood" implies the absence of the "hot-blooded" emotion, anger. The fact that anger and aggression do coexist in many situations does not mean that, like Laurel and Hardy, the presence of one automatically includes the other.

Some ethologists and sociobiologists like to point out that "primitive" brain structures, such as the hypothalamus and limbic system, are responsible for most emotional behavior, by which they usually mean rage, fear, and sexual desire. The fact that human beings share these structures with lower animals, they argue, must account for the human similarity to sheep, dogs, and rodents. (But human beings and dogs have noses, too, which does not imply that the evolution of the human nose has proceeded the same way as that of the dog's nose; I have yet to see a man outsniff a bloodhound.) The so-called primitive brain structures have evolved just as much as more "recent" brain structures have, and they reach their greatest development in human beings. Moreover, they are as vital to thought processes as they are to emotion.

The Roman philosopher Seneca recognized the uniquely human aspect of anger nearly two thousand years ago. "Wild beasts and all animals, except man, are not subject to anger," he wrote, "for while it is the foe of reason, it is nevertheless born only where reason dwells." He meant that anger usually involves a conscious judgment that an injustice, insult, or idiocy has been committed, and a choice of reactions. James Averill, a psychologist who has extensively researched the social function of the emotions, agrees. Anger is a human emotion, he believes, because only people can judge actions for their intention, justifiability, and negligence. Each angry episode contains a series of split-second decisions: Is that fist raised in provocation or playfulness? Is that provocation dangerous or safe? Is that danger worthy of retaliation, a laugh, or getting the hell out of here?

Averill believes, and I concur, that animal aggression is reminiscent of human anger just as animal communication is reminiscent of human speech, but that the concept of "angry animals" is misleading and metaphorical. Human anger is far more intricate and serves many more purposes than the rage reflex of lower animals. We do not need to deny our mammalian, primate heritage, but we do not need to reduce ourselves to it, either. Judgment and choice distinguish human beings from other species; judgment and choice are the hallmarks of human anger.

Some people incorrectly assume that to emphasize the role of thought in anger is to strip the emotion of its passion and power. Just the opposite is true. As Robert Solomon, author of The Passions, observes, to say that emotions are generated by our thoughts and judgments does not "reduce the drama of emotion to cool, calm belief." On the contrary, our ideas, commitments, and values generate our grandest and most enduring passions: the social activist's sense of justice, the revolutionary's determination, the grudge-holder's sense of self-righteousness, the lover's lifelong devotion.

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Copyright © 1982, 1989 by Carol Tavris

Tags: Anger

About the Author

Carol Tavris, Ph.D., earned her doctorate in social psychology from the University of Michigan. She was senior editor for several years of a then-new magazine, Psychology Today, and went on to develop a career as a teacher, lecturer, and psychology writer. She is coauthor (with Carole Wade) of The Longest War: Sex Differences in Perspective and an introductory textbook, Psychology. In addition to writing the "Mind Health" column for Vogue magazine, she has written many articles and book reviews on diverse issues in psychology for a wide variety of magazines, including The New York Times, Discover, Science Digest, Human Nature, New York, Harper's, Geo, Ms., Redbook, and Woman's Day. While living in New York, Tavris taught at the Human Relations Center of the New School for Social Research, and in Los Angeles she now teaches from time to time in the department of psychology at UCLA. More