Text 4. Fear and Anger

Not all of our emotions are positive. In fact, some of them like anger or extreme fear, can be extremely destructive. Some of the very earliest psychologists were interested in these negative emotions. In particular, they were interested in how the emotion that we feel connects with the physical sensations that we also experience when we are frightened or angry.

Both anger and fear are very active emotions. If you are angry with someone, your muscles tense up, and you become restless: some people will often stand up and pace around the room as a way of helping to control the tension. Similarly, if you are frightened your muscles become tense, and you may make small involuntary movements which express that tension. The two types of tension are not the same, of course, but they do have quite a lot in common. And they are quite different from the quiescent emotions, like depression, which involve listlessness and apathy rather than tension and activity.

In part, the tension which you feel when you are afraid is a survival response, which is shared by all mammals. In the natural world, if an animal is threatened by something, so that it becomes afraid, then there are only two options. It can stay and fight it out, in which case it will need all the strength it can muster, to win. Or it can run away, in which case it will need all the strength it can muster, to escape. In either case, therefore, the animal will need all of its strength. So this survival response is known as the ‘fight or flight' reaction.

Most of the time, we only use a small proportion of our potential strength and energy. But during the fight or flight response, the body changes the way that it operates physically, in order to maximise strength and energy. After all, there's no point holding back reserves when you are threatened by something which might kill you – if you die, they will not be of much use to you, will they?

The physical changes that happen are all ones which will release more energy to the muscles. Physical energy comes from a chemical reaction between oxygen and forms of glucose, or blood sugars. Both of these are carried in the bloodstream to the muscles which need energy, where, effectively, the sugar is 'burned up' to produce energy. This process takes oxygen, so the muscles that are in action need to have a continuous supply of fresh oxygenated blood if they were to work properly.

So many of these physical changes are concerned with getting oxygen into the bloodstream. We begin to breathe more deeply, and more rapidly, increasing the oxygen supply entering the lungs. Blood pressure increases, carrying blood round the body more quickly. And extra red blood cells (which carry oxygen) are released into the bloodstream.

If we are very frightened, blood vessels close to the surface of the skin shrink, making us paler but also likely to lose less blood if we are injured. The blood supply to the internal vital organs of the body, on the other hand, increases. We also have some left-over responses designed to protect us by making us look more fearsome: in many animals, their fur stands on end, making them look bigger and potentially more dangerous. Humans have lost their fur, but the hairs that we have left still try to stand on end, which is what causes goose-pimples.

We can see, then, that the fight or flight response is a very powerful reaction, which serves an important survival function – at least, when we are faced with threats that require physical action. It is not quite as helpful, though, when we are faced with non-physical threats, like anxiety about the mortgage, or fear of failing exams because they do not require physical action, we do not have a way of using up that energy, so we can quickly become stressed.

There are lesser degrees of the fight or flight response, too. When our attention is caught by something, or when we feel anxious about something, we experience the same kinds of physical changes, but to a much lower degree. The changes are strong enough to be measured, though, using sensitive detectors which will identify changes in pulse rate, heart rate, sweating, blood pressure and the like. A machine which measures several of these changes is known as a polygraph. Some people, such as police conducting interrogations, use polygraphs as lie-detectors, because they can detect the slight anxiety which people feel when they tell lie.

The general name which we give for this kind of physical state is known as arousal.

(Nicky Hayes. Psychology. – Great Britain; Cox & Wyman Ltd., 1994, – 260p.)