Psychology and Pedagogy of AngerRichardson, Roy Franklin
Science
Psychology and Pedagogy of Anger
Richardson, Roy Franklin
Anger
The anger consciousness is characterized by heightened mental activity.
A multiple number of images, attitudes, fluctuations of the emotional
and feeling content appear in rapid succession till the emotion
disappears. This statement is true for even the more tenuous instances
of anger. In fact some of the milder experiences have the most marked
changeableness of conscious content. Objectively there may be little
activity, while simultaneously on the mental side, there is a wealth of
processes which must be considered in the psychology of the emotions.
After making a rather minute collection of the different kinds of mental
reaction to anger, as shown by the introspections, it is observed that
they fall into three rather clear types of conscious behavior. The first
type is in the general direction of the emotive tendency and is the one
that most impulsively follows on the stimulus of the emotion. It
expresses pugnacity in some form. This type of reaction expresses a
tendency similar to the basal instinct of the emotion of anger, such as
thinking cutting remarks, imagining the offender’s humiliation, hostile
witticism, joking and sarcasm. This type of a reaction will be called
_attributive reaction_. A second type is contrary to pugnacity; the
instinctive impulse is reversed. A friendly attitude may be assumed
toward the offender, an adequate excuse it found for his offense, an
over polite attitude may be taken. This type of behavior will be called
the _contrary reaction_. A third type is one that is entirely of a
conscious attitudinal character. The subject becomes indifferent to the
whole situation exciting the emotion. The offense may suddenly be
apathetically ignored and the subject behaves unconcerned and assumes an
“I don’t care,” or a “What-is-the-use” attitude. This will be called
_indifferent reaction_. These three types of behavior are characteristic
of the reactive consciousness to anger. The emotion may contain one, or
it may contain all three of these types before it finally ends. Going
over the results of the observations of all the subjects, about fourteen
hundred sixty eight reactions are counted in the six hundred cases of
anger studied. Seventy one percent of such reactions are classified as
attributive reaction, eighteen percent are the contrary type, and eleven
percent are the indifferent.
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