Diagnosing Anger

How do you know if anger is an issue in your workplace? Is there a way to find out if it is a cause of problems in you, another individual, your team, or your organization? Fortunately, because anger has distinct indications, it lends itself to diagnosis: the technique of identifying a condition from its signs and symptoms. To some extent, we're all familiar with medical diagnosis and its role in identifying diseases and other ailments. Those who are highly familiar with it, such as doctors and medical technicians, will tell you that diagnosis is as much an art as it is a science. Mastering any art requires practice, and to practice, you need guidelines. In the case of anger, what signs and symptoms should you be looking for?

Like medical diagnosis, anger diagnosis is complicated because its signs and symptoms vary considerably. Depending upon the gravity of the anger, the context in which the anger occurs, and the idiosyncrasies of each "patient," anger may be repressed or expressed; and if it is expressed, it may be expressed directly or indirectly.

The Over- and Under-Expression of Anger
Again, in thinking about anger and the problems that it causes in the workplace, we tend to focus on people who over-express their anger by behaving aggressively. However, as mentioned earlier, people who under-express anger pose an equally important problem. In some cases, such people are not even aware of their anger. In other cases, they feel anger but express it in subtle ways. Perhaps they don't want to seem out of control or they've been taught that shows of anger are bad and can only make a situation worse. Perhaps they work someplace where anger is tacitly forbidden, where people who express anger are shut down by others, especially in a work-group situation. Or maybe they're what psychologists refer to as "anger-in" types.

Researchers have long made a distinction between anger-out types and anger-in types. Anger-out types tend to experience intensely angry feelings and over-express those feelings in hostile behavior, such as door slamming, yelling, and throwing things. Anger-in types tend to under-express their anger. They suppress their feelings of anger and direct those feelings inward, harboring secret grudges.

It was once thought that venting anger, as anger-out types do, was healthier than repressing it, as anger-in types do. The release of anger supposedly relieved the stress of anger. Today, though, research findings indicate that intense feelings of anger, whether expressed outwardly or held in, can have serious long-term health effects on the individual. However, anger-out types are less apt to suffer the short-term health effects of repressed anger.

The repressed feelings of anger-in types may manifest themselves in headaches, stomach pain, skin disorders, breathing difficulties, back pain, and depression. It is critical to note, though, that people often suffer from these symptoms for reasons entirely unrelated to anger, so they alone do not afford a sufficient base for a diagnosis of anger. (In general, it's not a good idea for laypersons to attempt to connect physical illness to emotional sources.)

Of course, anger-out types display far more symptoms as they're more likely to behave in obviously aggressive ways when angry. Aggression is an action response intended to inflict pain or discomfort on others.