What causes hostile anger?

What causes hostile anger?

Frustration is a normal reaction to unwanted events and circumstances, and will result when a person fails to get something they want or gets something they don’t want. Probably all human beings are subject to frustration every day of their lives; and, mostly, people take it in their stride. Hostile anger, though, is what happens when a person fails to get what they think they need or must or should have. Such anger is an emotional response to a frustrated demand (as opposed to a frustrated preference).

If you ask someone with an anger problem what causes their rage, they will usually have a simple answer: ‘other people cause my emotional upsets’. But this raises two questions. How can an external event create an internal reaction? And why is it that one person can be disappointed but calm in the face of a circumstance to which another reacts with rage? In reality, events and circumstances alone do not cause anger. Anger results from how people view what happens to them (Ellis, 1977; Novaco, 1975). Dysfunctional anger typically arises from one’s interpretations (‘inferences’) of what is happening and the self-defeating evaluations that follow.

Inferential distortions
Human beings are constantly interpreting, or ‘inferring’ what is going on around them. According to Beck’s ‘Cognitive Therapy’, there are certain ways of inferring that result in distorted, inaccurate views of reality (Burns, 1980). Here are the most common ones:

 Mind-reading: believing that you know what is going on in another person’s mind; for example, thinking that someone is viewing you in a negative way.

 Fortune-telling: believing your own predictions of the future, e.g. ‘If I don’t get my partner under control then he/she might leave me’.

 Overgeneralisation: building up something so that it becomes bigger than it really is, e.g. ‘Everything is going wrong in my life’.

 Filtering: seeing only the negatives ‘there’s nothing good about my life/this situation/this person/etc.’

 Emotional reasoning: believing that your emotions prove something about reality, e.g. ‘I know that he/she has done something wrong – otherwise I wouldn’t be angry!’

Sunil Kumar                                    Jayasudha Kamaraj
Clinical Psychologist                       Counseling Psychologist
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