Are We Raging Out of Control?

After arguing over a beeped horn, one man runs another down and drags him to death in Santa Monica. In Massachusetts, one father beats another to death after a kids’ pickup hockey game. And airline workers in 100 cities declare “a day of action” to protest increasing abuse by aggressive passengers.

Road rage, air rage, sports rage. During the past several years, people have begun ascribing random acts of violence to a larger trend--a perceived growing level of underlying social anger. According to conventional wisdom, the nation is in the midst of a rage epidemic, a nation driven by increased population and a fast-paced lifestyle to a permanent boiling point. Raised voices and obscene gestures have ever been part of American discourse, but now we watch each other warily, in case the overheard employer’s slight or the tailgater is the final incident that will push the fellow next to us into homicidal fury.

Yet while the anecdotal evidence seems to mount, the statistics do not. According to the FBI, violent crime--which includes assault and murder--has been steadily declining for almost 10 years.

Obviously, not all violent crime involves rage, and all rage does not lead to violent crime. Researchers agree that social context is a major factor in any episode of violent rage. But there is not a clinical definition for rage, no clear-cut threshold between it and anger. Rage is an emotion, and emotions are difficult to pin down biologically. In post-Columbine America, however, the scientific community has been pressed from all sides to explain the causes of violence. And several recent studies point to a biological commonality among people unable to control their emotions--which seems to indicate that the image of a previously nonviolent person suddenly snapping into enraged violence is probably more myth than reality.

Although what people fear from this seeming escalation of rage is the drawn gun, the murderous assault, the term “rage” is used to describe a wide variety of behaviors, from poor driving to sharp-tongued impatience to true homicidal fury. There is a difference between one motorist giving another the finger and someone intentionally running over and killing the man who just honked at him, yet “rage” is often used to describe both scenarios.

“There is a general language escalation in our culture,” says social psychologist Carol Tavris, author of “Anger: the Misunderstood Emotion” (Touchstone, 1989). “So first you have to get rid of the hyperbole and define the category.”

According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, rage is akin to the Latin term rabere, to rave or be mad. The first definition is “insanity,” the second “a furious uncontrolled anger.” A notable difference, since most psychologists do not consider anger, even a furious anger, a mental illness in and of itself. Everyone is capable of feeling rage; the differences are in how people respond to that feeling.

“Anger is a psychobiological emotional state that varies from irritation to rage,” says Charles Spielberger, a research professor at the University of South Florida and past president of the American Psychological Assn. “But it’s important to remember that anger is not a bad thing. It’s there to provide a signal that something is going wrong, that we should do something, whether it be leaving a situation or using assertive behavior.”

As with fear, the physiology of anger cannot be completely explained in a step-by-step biological way. Scientists do not know why, for example, certain stimuli trigger anger in one person and not in another. But, according to Spielberger, anger involves fairly specific activity in the autonomic nervous system, including increased secretion of hormones that “prepare a human or animal for fight or flight.”

This chemical bath creates the physical symptoms of anger--the increased heart rate, deep breathing, raised agitation level and increased body temperature. But these symptoms are, to a certain extent, self-propelling. In studies of facial expressions and muscle activity, researchers have found that people directed to make an angry face experienced many of the actual symptoms of anger, even though they had nothing to be angry about. Similarly, contrary to the modern belief that venting anger is a good release, researchers found that yelling or gesturing actually increases the symptoms of anger.

So in most cases, rage is an anger level a person builds to, rather than a sudden flash or breakdown.

Feeling anger, or even rage, Spielberger says, is very different from how an individual expresses it; one is an emotion, the other a behavior. “There are two types of anger,” he explains, “anger in or anger out. I would consider rage intense anger expressed out.”

Anger Does Not Always Lead to Loss of Control

According to Tavris, most social scientists use three categories to explain the behavior most people tend to lump under the word “rage”--anger, hostility and aggression.

“Anger involves a state of physiological arousal,” she says, “which means you cannot be in it permanently or you will die. Hostility is a disposition toward anger, and aggression is behaving with intention to harm.”

Anger, she says, “may lead to aggression or it may lead to baking a cake. It depends on the person. Rage may be an extreme case of anger, but people can have long and extreme episodes of anger and not lose control. So the question becomes: Under what conditions do people lose control?”

Moreover, says Tavris, “it’s important to realize that violent rage rarely happens out of nowhere.”

“I would imagine if you interviewed some of these people [involved in publicized instances of rage] you would find they have a history of psychosis,” says Robert Maurer, a psychologist at UCLA’s School of Medicine. “But more often, the media reports the crime and then you don’t hear any of the follow-up.”

The Massachusetts killing is a good example. According to stories in the Boston Globe, both men, who, ironically, came to blows over the level of fighting on the rink, had histories of assault, a fact that many papers in other cities failed to include. (Thomas Junta has been charged with manslaughter and is awaiting trial.) According to his neighbors, Robert Cleaves, the suspect in the Santa Monica 1998 road rage death, was known for violent episodes. (He was convicted of second-degree murder.) At USC, clinical neuroscientist Adrian Raine has been working on a broader sort of follow-up by conducting brain imagery research on murderers. And while no one has done such imagery to specifically target rage, he says, some of his findings may explain why most of us never get into a fistfight or run another car off the road.

“All of us get angry at times,” he says, “even for small, trivial things. But most of us have a good functioning prefrontal cortex, which regulates aggressive feelings much like an emergency brake can slow or stop a car.”

According to his research, including the study of the murderers and a longer-term study following children through adulthood, people who commit violence have poor functioning prefrontal cortexes; often, this area of the brain is smaller than in normal, more controlled people. And though such a deformity could be genetic, Raine says, the damage could also be caused by injury--a shaken infant or a beaten child could experience damage to the prefrontal cortex. So the traditional thinking that an abused child runs a greater risk of being an abuser may have roots in biology as well as psychology.

Bad Brain Circuitry Can Cause Violence

At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, another study blames “bad wiring” in the brain for impulsive violence, although its authors believe outside influences may be as much at fault as internal ones.

“When you look at the numbers, it is obvious that the vast majority of people do not show evidence of violent behavior,” says Richard Davidson, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the university and co-author of the study, which appeared in the July 28 issue of the journal Science. “But there are individuals who show a propensity for violence, and these differences result from specific circuitry of the brain.”

Davidson’s study also concentrated on the prefrontal cortex, where researchers found that the activity that normally constrains impulsive outbursts is blunted or entirely absent in violent criminals. Though this is caused by a physical malfunction, Davidson calls this area of the brain “extremely susceptible to outside influence.”

“What we want to stress with our research is that bad environments cause bad brains,” he says. “Bad environments can actually rewire the brain, especially the control of negative emotions.” The exact nature of a “bad environment,” he says, has yet to be determined. “Is it exposure to violence on TV or being abused as a child? We don’t know. The research isn’t there yet.”

But, he adds, the idea that pressures from a hurry-up society are creating a populace of time bombs is not credible. “Most of us have the machinery in place to control our emotions. [With this new research] we might be able to predict which individuals are prone to violence. And this propensity can be changed by pharmaceutological and behavioral methods.”

With his longer-term studies, USC’s Raine believes he has identified certain biological predispositions for violent behaviors. “Obviously, social situations are the triggers that drive behaviors,” he says, “but most of us don’t strike out. Most of us think of alternatives. What varies are our arousal levels. And, paradoxically, it’s the people with low arousal levels--low sweat rate, slower brain activity, lower resting heart rate--who are more likely to lose it.”

Raine thinks that people with lower arousal rates unconsciously seek out stimulation to jolt them up to more normal levels. “And for some people, robbing a store or beating someone up provides that jolt,” he says. “Others might go bungee jumping.” Either way, the change in arousal rates is more dramatic, and so possibly harder to control.

Like Spielberger, Raine calls anger a normal reaction “if it is appropriate to the situational context.” Rage, he says, is almost always inappropriate, and more than that, it’s maladaptive.

“If you work yourself into a rage at someone for cutting you off on the freeway,” he says, “you are reacting inappropriately. There is nothing you can do to alter that person’s behavior; there is no way you can win.”

Environment Can Also Influence Behavior

While the scientists seem to agree that those who act out their rage through violence are almost certainly suffering from a mental or biological defect, no one discounts the influence of environment and society.

Tavris points out that some cultures train males to respond to insults, real or perceived, with aggression. A University of Michigan study, she says, identified certain communities, particularly those in the American West and South as “cultures of honor.”

“In agricultural communities, people tend to cooperate,” she says. “No one’s going to steal your field of corn one night. But if you have to be prepared to defend your property, males are taught to be hyper-alert to slights to their masculinity.” Those behavioral traditions, she says, often outlast the contexts that create them.

Pointing to statistics of declining violence, Tavris says, the recent concern over rage may have more to do with perception than reality. “There will always be people with impulse problems, no matter what society we have,” she says. “And people will always believe the single dramatic anecdote rather than the facts. They will believe a single vivid image represents the human experience. It is simply a bias in the way people think.”

Increased media sensitivity to acts of violent rage also contributes to the perception that we are surrounded by souls on the brink--a killing in Massachusetts is covered as if it happened in our own backyard. This heightened awareness, says Davidson, seems to indicate that as a society we have become less accepting of rage and violence--the standard barroom brawl, even one that ended in death, was once a much more commonplace occurrence. So the fact that incidents of rage are unusual enough to make the headlines may actually be good news, especially if the concern leads to more research and increased understanding.

“It’s a good thing we are very aware of the problem,” says USC’s Raine. “In the past, studies that look at prevention haven’t looked at the biological causes.”

Florida’s Spielberger agrees that research is key, but also stresses that part of the solution is time-honored methods of self-restraint. “Feel the anger, yes, but it is not always necessary to express it. Count to 10. Walk away. Use assertive, but not violent, behavior.”

But, adds Tavris, this kind of take-no-guff attitude is iconically American. “Letting it all out is the American philosophy, and that generates anger and frustration,” she says. “Unfortunately, our heroes are not the guys who say, ‘Let’s see if we can sit down and work this out.’ ”

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Mary McNamara can be reached at mary.mcnamara@latimes.com.