American Anger Control and the Role of Popular Culture

Abstract

Americans have a peculiar relationship with the emotion of anger. Many Americans, I’m tempted to say most, and certainly many foreigners believe that our society embraces too much anger. We are frequently reminded of real or imagined occasions in which we let unwarranted anger spill over — the decades-long campaign against ‘road rage’ is a case in point. Yet in point of fact American society has been working hard for several decades on efforts to control the emotion. Workplace anger, once commonplace, is severely proscribed; American politicians, on another front, are carefully instructed to manage anger with great care. Revealingly, in many childrearing manuals the word ‘anger’ has been replaced by ‘aggression’, indicating clearly that official national standards find little if any positive role for the emotion, merely highlighting its destructive potential. Comparative studies — for example, between France and the United States — also emphasize our national distrust of anger, the American preference for avoiding even limited outbursts; the French in contrast enjoy anger somewhat more freely.