Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  On the desktop was a display of books: the complete works of Shakespeare and Milton were propped open and certain words, phrases and letters were circled in various colored inks. I could make out no system or code at first glance, but there were furious notes in the margins. Phrases like “Oh Hell!” or “The Beast with Two Backs!” or “Womankind is too unkind!” Sprinkled over Shakespeare and Milton were the remains of a carefully tornup twenty- dollar bill. Elsewhere on the desk were reproductions ripped from art books. They all depicted God or Jesus or Saint Sebastian. I ran into the living room to look for Brian and found him adjusting the amplifier on the hi-fi. He was playing Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, and he began turning the volume up loud and then suddenly turning it down soft, to create a sort of siren effect. “How loud can you play Bach in this society?” he demanded. “This loud?” He turned it up. “This soft?” He turned it down so that it was barely audible. “You see! There’s no way to play Bach in this society!” “Brian, what did you do with my thesis?” It was a rhetorical question. I knew perfectly well what he had done with it. Brian was fiddling with the hi-fi and pretending he hadn’t heard me. “What did you do with my thesis?” “How loud do you think you can play Bach in this society without the police coming?” “What did you do with my thesis?” “This loud?” He turned the volume up. “What did you do with my thesis?” “This soft?” He turned the volume down. “What did you do with my thesis?” “This loud?” “Brian!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. It was no use. I went to my desk and sat there staring at the “display” he’d left. I wanted to kill him or myself. Instead I cried. Brian walked in. “Who do you think will go to heaven?” he asked. I didn’t answer. “Will Bach go? Will Milton go? Will Shakespeare go? Will Shakeswoof go? Will Saint Sebastian the Bastard go? Will Abelard the Gelding go? Will Sin-bad the Sailor go? Will Tinbad the Tailor go? Will Jinbad the Jailor go? Will Norman Mailer go? Will Whinbad the Whaler go? Will Finbad the Failer go? Will Rinbad the Railer go? Will Joyce go? Will James go? Will Dante go or has he been already? Will Homer go? Will Yeats go? Will Hardy go with a hard-on? Will Rabelais go with the Rabble? Will Villon go vilely? Will Raleigh go royally? Will Mozart go lightly? Will Mahler go heavily? Will El Greco go in a clap of lightning? Will the lightbulbs go?”

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Violent defendants plead that they were hijacked by their anger, assuming that anger is one single, unitary cauldron that, when unconstrained by clear thought, bubbles over to unleash a torrent of aggression. Juries look for remorse in a defendant, as if remorse had a single, detectable expression in the face and body. Expert witnesses testify that a defendant’s bad behavior was caused by one errant brain blob, an example of baseless blob-ology. The law is a social contract that exists in a social world. Are you responsible for your actions? Yes, says the essentialist view of human nature, as long as you haven’t been commandeered by your emotions. Are other people responsible for your actions? No, you are an individual with free will. How do you determine what a defendant is feeling? By detecting his or her emotions in expressions. How do you make a just, moral decision? By setting your emotions aside. What is the nature of harm? Physical harm, that is, tissue damage, is worse than emotional harm, which is considered to be separate from the body and less tangible. All of these assumptions—born of essentialism—are baked into the law at its deepest levels, driving verdicts of guilt and innocence and gauging punishments on a massive scale, even as neuroscience has been quietly debunking them as myths. 2 Simply put, some people are punished undeservedly, and others escape punishment, based on an outdated theory of the mind that is rooted in belief rather than science. In this chapter, we’ll explore some common myths about emotion in the legal system and ask whether a biologically richer theory of the mind, especially one that is grounded in realistic neuroscience, can improve society’s pursuit of justice. ... As every budding adolescent discovers, freedom is great. You can decide to stay out past midnight with your friends. You can decide not to do your homework. You can choose to eat cake for dinner. But as we all learn, choices come with consequences. The law is founded on the simple idea that you can choose to treat others well or badly. Choice bestows responsibility. If you treat others badly and consequently they suffer some harm, then you must be punished, particularly if you intended that harm. This is how society shows its respect for you as an individual. Your value as a human being, some legal scholars say, is rooted in the fact that you choose your actions and are responsible for them. 3 If something interferes with your ability to choose your actions freely, the law says that you might be less responsible for the harm you caused.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  When another driver cuts you off in traffic and your blood pressure rises, your hands become sweaty, and you shout as you slam on the brakes and feel annoyed . . . this is an act of categorization. When your young child picks up a sharp knife and your breathing slows, your hands are dry, you smile, and you calmly ask her to put it down as you feel annoyed inside . . . this is an act of categorization. When you see another person staring at you oddly with wide eyes and perceive him as annoyed, this is also an act of categorization. In all these instances, your conceptual knowledge of “Annoyance” drives the categorization, and your brain makes meaning that is tied to context. My story in chapter 2 about the guy in graduate school who asked me to lunch, when I thought I felt attraction but in fact I had the flu, is another example of categorization. My body budget was disrupted by a virus, but I experienced the resulting change in affect as attraction to my lunch partner because I’d constructed an instance of infatuation. If I’d categorized my symptoms in a different context, I might have understood them as something that a few Tylenol and a couple of days’ rest could cure. Your genes gave you a brain that can wire itself to its physical and social environment. The people around you, in your culture, maintain that environment with their concepts and help you live in that environment by transmitting those concepts from their brains to yours. And later, you transmit your concepts to the brains of the next generation. It takes more than one human brain to create a human mind. What I have not yet explained, however, is how this all works inside the brain: the biology of categorization. What brain networks are involved? How is this process related to your brain’s intrinsic, predictive powers, and how does it affect your all-important body budget? That is what we’ll discuss next as you learn the final piece of the puzzle for how emotions are made in the brain. 6How the Brain Makes EmotionsHave you ever wanted to punch your boss? I would never advocate workplace violence, of course, and many bosses are terrific work partners. But sometimes we are blessed with supervisors who personify the German emotion word Backpfeifengesicht, meaning “a face in need of a fist.” Suppose you have such a boss, and he’s been handing you extra projects for almost a year. You’ve been expecting a promotion for all your good work, but he has just informed you that the promotion went to someone else. How would you feel?

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Emotion stereotyping is even worse when the female victim of domestic violence is African American. The archetypal victim in American culture is fearful, passive, and helpless, but in African American communities, women sometimes violate this stereotype by defending themselves vigorously against their alleged batterers. By fighting back, they reinforce a different stereotype of female emotion, the “angry black woman,” which is also pervasive in the U.S. legal system. These women are more likely to be charged with domestic violence themselves, even when their actions were in self-defense and were less severe than the original assault. (No “stand your ground” allowed here!) And if they injure or kill their alleged batterer, they usually fare worse than a European American woman in the same situation.22 For example, consider the case of Jean Banks, an African American woman who stabbed and killed her live-in partner, James “Brother” McDonald, after he had beaten her for years, sometimes so severely that she required medical attention. On this particular day, both had been drinking, and during an argument, McDonald pushed Banks to the ground and attempted to slice her with a glass cutter. Banks grabbed a knife to defend herself and stabbed him through the heart. She claimed self-defense but nonetheless was convicted of second-degree murder. (Compare this to light-skinned Judy Norman, who was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, a lesser charge.)23 Angry women do not fare well outside of domestic violence cases either. Judges infer all sorts of negative personality characteristics in angry female rape victims that they tend not to attribute to angry male crime victims. When a woman has been raped, for instance, judges (and juries and the police) expect to see her express grief on the witness stand, which tends to bring the rapist a heavier sentence. When a female victim expresses anger, judges evaluate her negatively. These judges are falling prey to another version of the “angry bitch” phenomenon. When people perceive emotion in a man, they usually attribute it to his situation, but when they perceive emotion in a woman, they connect it to her personality. She’s a bitch, but he’s just having a bad day.24 Outside the courtroom, we find laws where gender stereotypes prescribe the acceptable emotions we must feel and express. Abortion laws, as written, signal which emotions are appropriate for a woman to feel, namely, remorse and guilt, whereas relief and happiness go unmentioned. The debate over the legality of gay marriage was, in a way, whether the law should sanction the emotion of romantic love between two people of the same sex. Adoption laws governing gay men raise the question of whether a father’s love is equal to that of a mother.25

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  But I was quite positive that as long as my regime lasted she would never, never be permitted to go with a youngster in rut to a movie, or neck in a car, or go to boy-girl parties at the houses of schoolmates, or indulge out of my earshot in boy-girl telephone conversations, even if “only discussing his relations with a friend of mine.” Lo was enraged by all this—called me a lousy crook and worse—and I would probably have lost my temper had I not soon discovered, to my sweetest relief, that what really angered her was my depriving her not of a specific satisfaction but of a general right. I was impinging, you see, on the conventional program, the stock pastimes, the “things that are done,” the routine of youth; for there is nothing more conservative than a child, especially a girl-child, be she the most auburn and russet, the most mythopoeic nymphet in October’s orchard-haze. Do not misunderstand me. I cannot be absolutely certain that in the course of the winter she did not manage to have, in a casual way, improper contacts with unknown young fellows; of course, no matter how closely I controlled her leisure, there would constantly occur unaccounted-for time leaks with over-elaborate explanations to stop them up in retrospect; of course, my jealousy would constantly catch its jagged claw in the fine fabrics of nymphet falsity; but I did definitely feel—and can now vouchsafe for the accuracy of my feeling—that there was no reason for serious alarm. I felt that way not because I never once discovered any palpable hard young throat to crush among the masculine mutes that flickered somewhere in the background; but because it was to me “overwhelmingly obvious” (a favorite expression with my aunt Sybil) that all varieties of high school boys—from the perspiring nincompoop whom “holding hands” thrills, to the self-sufficient rapist with pustules and a souped-up car—equally bored my sophisticated young mistress. “All this noise about boys gags me,” she had scrawled on the inside of a schoolbook, and underneath, in Mona’s hand (Mona is due any minute now), there was the sly quip: “What about Rigger?” (due too). Faceless, then, are the chappies I happened to see in her company.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Hul-lo," he said. I gave a bitter little grunt, and he said, "I suppose I should have known you'd be an art-buff." Even in that moment I found myself recalling my spluttering efforts to convey to Edie the intensity of his awfulness, his pseudish self-confidence, his active vanity, his thick-skinned suggestive matiness, his, his . . . and seeing all over again how I had failed. "I'm not an art-buff," I said in an icy mutter; and went on towards the stairs. "Even so, it's fifty francs to go in." I was just by the desk and looking down at his work, densely written pages of notes that he was going through with a yellow highlighter. It was A levels looming, a hopeless pretence of system . . . "I work here." (By which I clearly meant, I work here, arsehole.) Any sense of a gaffe was lost in his satisfied twinkle as he absorbed this fact. Ronald something—"researcher". It must be paranoia but I couldn't help feeling that one of the things he was researching was me—not of course for myself but as a figure in the life of a certain tall lean blond young man . . . "I wasn't told about anyone working here." I shrugged. "You mean you're one of the guards?" "I work with the Director—I'm his assistant." I saw him glimpse the opportunity of delaying me and asking me further questions. "And you say you're not an art-buff!" I sighed sharply. "You've never told me your name, incidentally." Was there any way I could refuse it? I could use a false name, I could be Casey Hopper again for a minute . . . "Manners," I said sternly, pleased as I had sometimes been before that it meant something and could sound like a reproof. "Well, Manners," he said, " I hope this means we may see more of each other." He took up his highlighting pen and settled forward again with a queeny wobble of the head, as if to imply I had discomposed him unnecessarily. As I started up the stairs he said, without looking round, "The Director's not here today, by the way. As I'm sure you know."

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I rang Reva’s buzzer at her building on West Ninety-eighth a few times. Ativan would be nice, I thought. And strangely I was craving lithium, too. And Seroquel. A few hours of drooling and nausea sounded like cleansing torture before hitting the sleep hard—on Ambien, Percocet, one stray Vicodin I’d been sitting on. I was thinking I’d get my pills from Reva’s, go home, and then I could hit the sleep for ten straight hours, get up, have a glass of water, a little snack, then ten straight more. Please! I buzzed again and waited, imagining Reva trudging up the block toward her building with a dozen bags of groceries from D’Agostino’s, shock and shame on her face when she saw me waiting for her, arms laden with brownie mix and ice cream and chips and cake or whatever it was Reva liked to eat and vomit up so much. The nerve of her. The hypocrisy. I paced in circles around her crummy little vestibule, punching at her buzzer violently. I couldn’t wait. I had her spare keys. I let myself in. Going up the stairs, I smelled vinegar. I smelled cleaning detergent. I thought I smelled piss. A mauve-colored cat sat on the second-floor railing like an owl. “Fussing with animals in dreams can have primitive and violent consequences,” Dr. Tuttle had said to me once, petting her fat, snoring tabby. I felt like pushing the cat down the stairwell when I reached the landing. The look in its eye was so smug. I knocked on the door to Reva’s apartment. I heard no voices, just the wind howling. I expected to find Reva in her apartment wearing pink flannel pajamas with cartoon bunnies on them and furry pink slippers, in some weird sugar coma, perhaps, or crying hysterically because she was “at a loss for how to handle reality,” or whatever garbage she was feeling. The silver key opened her apartment door. I walked inside. “Hello?” I could have sworn I smelled puke in the darkness. “Reva, it’s me,” I said. “Your best friend.” I flicked up the light switch by the door, casting the place in a sweltering blush-hued glow. Pink lighting? The place was messy, silent, stuffy, just as I remembered it. “Reva? Are you in here?” A five-pound weight propped open the one window in the living room, but no air was coming through. A ThighMaster hung from the curtain rod, a floral drape bunched and pinned to the side with a Chip Clip. “I came for my shit,” I said to the walls.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  But I was also hating Kolner for his narrowness and for wasting my time and money with warmed- over clichés about woman’s place. Who needed that? You could get that out of a fortune cookie. And it didn’t cost $40 for fifty minutes either. “If you really feel that way about me, I don’t know why you don’t quit right now,” Kolner spat out. “Why stick around and take this shit from me?” That was Kolner exactly. When he felt he’d been attacked, he became nasty and threw in a four-letter word to show how hip he was. “Typical small-man complex,” I muttered. “What was that?” “Oh nothing.” “Come on, I want to hear it. I can take it.” Big brave analyst. “I was just thinking, Dr. Kolner, that you have what is known in psychiatric literature as a ‘small-man complex.’ You get feisty and start hurling four-letter words around when somebody points out that you aren’t God Almighty. I know it must be tough on you to be only five foot four—but supposedly you were analyzed and that should make it easier to bear.” “Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me,” Kolner snarled. He had regressed all the way to second grade. He thought he was being very witty. “Look—why is it that you can throw stale clichés at me—and I’m supposed to be grateful for your superior insight and even pay you for it—but if I do the same to you—which surely is my right, given all the bread I push in your direction—then you get furious and start talking like some spiteful seven year old.” “I simply said you ought to quit if you feel that way about me. Leave. Walk out. Slam the door. Tell me to go to hell.” “And admit that the past two years and the thousands of dollars that have passed between us have been a total loss? I mean maybe you can write it off that way—but I have a somewhat greater stake in deluding myself that something positive went on here.” “You can work it all out with your next analyst,” Kolner said. “You can figure out what went wrong from your point of view....” “My point of view! Don’t you see why so many people are getting so fucking fed up with analysis? It’s all the fault of you stupid analysts.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Take the case of Gordon Patterson, who caught his wife, Roberta, “in a state of semiundress” with her boyfriend, John Northrup. Patterson shot Northrup twice in the head, killing him. Patterson confessed to the shooting but argued that he was less culpable due to his “extreme emotional disturbance” at the time of the crime. According to U.S. law, Patterson’s sudden burst of rage caused him not to be fully in control of his actions, and he was therefore found guilty of second-degree murder—rather than first-degree murder, which requires premeditation and carries a harsher punishment. In other words, rational killing is considered worse than emotional killing, all other circumstances being equal. 4 The U.S. legal system assumes that emotions are part of our supposed animal nature and cause us to perform foolish and even violent acts, unless we control them with our rational thoughts. Centuries ago, legal minds decided that people, when provoked, sometimes kill because they haven’t “cooled off” yet, and anger erupts unbidden. Anger steams, boils, explodes, and leaves a wake of destruction in its path. Anger makes people unable to conform their actions to the law, and so partially mitigates a person’s responsibility for his actions. The argument is known as a heat-of-passion defense. 5 The heat-of-passion defense depends on some familiar assumptions from the classical view of emotion. The first assumption is that there is one universal type of anger, with a specific fingerprint, that justifies such a defense to a charge of murder. It supposedly includes a flushed face, clenched jaw, flared nostrils, and increased heart rate, blood pressure, and perspiration. As you’ve already learned, this alleged fingerprint is merely a Western cultural stereotype that’s not supported by data. On average, people’s heart rates go up when angry, but there’s tremendous variation, and similar increases are also part of the stereotypes for happiness, sadness, and fear. And yet, most killings are not committed in happiness or sadness; and if they were, the law does not consider these emotional episodes to be a mitigating factor. 6 What’s more, most instances of anger do not lead to killing. I can state quite definitively that in twenty years of creating anger in my lab, we’ve never seen a test subject kill anybody. We see a far greater repertoire of action: swearing, threatening, pounding the table, leaving the room, crying, trying to resolve whatever conflict they’re having, or even smiling while wishing ill upon their oppressor. So the idea of anger as a trigger for uncontrolled murder is at best questionable. 7 When I explain to people in the legal profession that anger has no biological fingerprint, they often assume I am claiming emotions don’t exist. That’s not at all the case. Of course anger exists. You just can’t point to a spot in a defendant’s brain, face, or EKG, and say, “Look, anger is right here,” let alone draw legal conclusions.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I knew it would horrify him. “Bolivia time is an hour ahead of New York,” he said. “If they really think they can coordinate births, those babies won’t be born until eleven, and I’m not staying past ten thirty. Anyway, gross.” “Do you think it’s exploitative?” “No, I just don’t really want to see a bunch of Bolivian women bleeding and moaning for hours.” He fiddled with his phone as I recited language from the gallery’s description of the videographer’s work. Trevor repeated words sarcastically. “‘Tectonic,’” he said. “‘Quasi.’ Jesus!” Then he called someone and had a very brief, yes-no conversation, said, “See you soon.” “Do you even like me?” I asked him once he’d hung up. “What kind of question is that?” “I love you,” I was angry enough to say. “How is that relevant?” “Are you kidding?” Trevor told the driver to drop me off at the nearest subway station. That was the last time I’d seen him. I didn’t go to the party. I just got on the train and went back home. • • • I LOOKED OUT the windows at the darkening sky. I tried to rub the dirt off the glass, but it was impossible. The dirt was stuck on the other side. The trees were all bare and black against the pale snow. The East River was still and black. The sky was black and heavy over Queens, a blanket of blinking yellow lights spreading out into infinity. There were stars in the sky, I knew, but I couldn’t see them. The moon was more visible now, a white flame glowing high while red lights of planes sailing down to LaGuardia blipped by. In the distance, people were living lives, having fun, learning, making money, fighting and walking around and falling in and out of love. People were being born, growing up, dropping dead. Trevor was probably spending his Christmas vacation with some woman in Hawaii or Bali or Tulum. He was probably fingering her at that very moment, telling her he loved her. He might actually be happy. I shut the window and lowered all the blinds. “Merry Christmas,” Reva said in a voice mail. “I’m here at the hospital, but I’m coming back to town for the office party tomorrow. Ken will be there, of course. . . .” I deleted her message and went back to sleep. • • • CHRISTMAS DAY, around nightfall, I woke up on the sofa in a restless fog. Unable to sleep or use my hands to work the remote or open the bottle of temazepam, I went out to get my fix of coffee. Downstairs, the doorman sat reading the paper on his little stool. “Merry Christmas,” he yawned, turning the page, barely looking up at me.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  This time I hit something hard. I hit the back of a black rocking chair, not unlike Dolly Schiller’s—my bullet hit the inside surface of its back whereupon it immediately went into a rocking act, so fast and with such zest that any one coming into the room might have been flabbergasted by the double miracle: that chair rocking in a panic all by itself, and the armchair, where my purple target had just been, now void of all live content. Wiggling his fingers in the air, with a rapid heave of his rump, he flashed into the music room and the next second we were tugging and gasping on both sides of the door which had a key I had overlooked. I won again, and with another abrupt movement Clare the Impredictable sat down before the piano and played several atrociously vigorous, fundamentally hysterical, plangent chords, his jowls quivering, his spread hands tensely plunging, and his nostrils emitting the soundtrack snorts which had been absent from our fight. Still singing those impossible sonorities, he made a futile attempt to open with his foot a kind of seaman’s chest near the piano. My next bullet caught him somewhere in the side, and he rose from his chair higher and higher, like old, gray, mad Nijinski, like Old Faithful, like some old nightmare of mine, to a phenomenal altitude, or so it seemed, as he rent the air—still shaking with the rich black music—head thrown back in a howl, hand pressed to his brow, and with his other hand clutching his armpit as if stung by a hornet, down he came on his heels and, again a normal robed man, scurried out into the hall. I see myself following him through the hall, with a kind of double, triple, kangaroo jump, remaining quite straight on straight legs while bouncing up twice in his wake, and then bouncing between him and the front door in a ballet-like stiff bounce, with the purpose of heading him off, since the door was not properly closed. Suddenly dignified, and somewhat morose, he started to walk up the broad stairs, and, shifting my position, but not actually following him up the steps, I fired three or four times in quick succession, wounding him at every blaze; and every time I did it to him, that horrible thing to him, his face would twitch in an absurd clownish manner, as if he were exaggerating the pain; he slowed down, rolled his eyes half closing them and made a feminine “ah!” and he shivered every time a bullet hit him as I if I were tickling him, and every time I got him with those slow, clumsy, blind bullets of mine, he would say under his breath, with a phoney British accent—all the while dreadfully twitching, shivering, smirking, but withal talking in a curiously detached and even amiable manner: “Ah, that hurts, sir, enough!

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  To look at the black hairs on the back of his pudgy hands ... To wander with a hundred eyes over his purple silks and hirsute chest foreglimpsing the punctures, and mess, and music of pain ... To know that this semi-animated, subhuman trickster who had sodomized my darling—oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss! “No, I am afraid I am neither of the Brewsters.” He cocked his head, looking more pleased than ever. “Guess again, Punch.” “Ah,” said Punch, “so you have not come to bother me about those long-distance calls?” “You do make them once in a while, don’t you?” “Excuse me?” I said I had said I thought he had said he had never— “People,” he said, “people in general, I’m not accusing you, Brewster, but you know it’s absurd the way people invade this damned house without even knocking. They use the vaterre, they use the kitchen, they use the telephone. Phil calls Philadelphia. Pat calls Patagonia. I refuse to pay. You have a funny accent, Captain.” “Quilty,” I said, “do you recall a little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze? Dolly called Dolores, Colo.?” “Sure, she may have made those calls, sure. Any place. Paradise, Wash., Hell Canyon. Who cares?” “I do, Quilty. You see, I am her father.” “Nonsense,” he said. “You are not. You are some foreign literary agent. A Frenchman once translated my Proud Flesh as La Fierté de la Chair. Absurd.” “She was my child, Quilty.” In the state he was in he could not really be taken aback by anything, but his blustering manner was not quite convincing. A sort of wary inkling kindled his eyes into a semblance of life. They were immediately dulled again. “I’m very fond of children myself,” he said, “and fathers are among my best friends.” He turned his head away, looking for something. He beat his pockets. He attempted to rise from his seat. “Down!” I said—apparently much louder than I intended. “You need not roar at me,” he complained in his strange feminine manner. “I just wanted a smoke. I’m dying for a smoke.” “You’re dying anyway.” “Oh, chucks,” he said. “You begin to bore me. What do you want? Are you French, mister? Woolly-woo-boo-are? Let’s go to the barroomette and have a stiff—” He saw the little dark weapon lying in my palm as if I were offering it to him. “Say!” he drawled (now imitating the underworld numbskull of movies), “that’s a swell little gun you’ve got there. What d’you want for her?” I slapped down his outstretched hand and he managed to knock over a box on a low table near him.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  2 5 When faced with a large collection of diverse experiments like this, it’s hard to extract a consistent story. Fortunately, scientists have a technique to analyze all the data together and reach a unified conclusion. It’s called a “meta-analysis.” Scientists comb through large numbers of experiments conducted by different researchers, combining their results statistically. As a simple example, suppose you wanted to check if increased heart rate is part of the bodily fingerprint of happiness. Rather than run your own experiment, you could do a meta-analysis of other experiments that measured heart rate during happiness, even incidentally (e.g., the study could be about the relationship between sex and heart attacks and have nothing centrally to do with emotion). You would search for all the relevant scientific papers, collect the relevant statistics from them, and analyze them en masse to test the hypothesis. Where emotions and the autonomic nervous system are concerned, four significant meta-analyses have been conducted in the last two decades, the largest of which covered more than 220 physiology studies and nearly 22,000 test subjects. None of these four meta-analyses found consistent and specific emotion fingerprints in the body. Instead, the body’s orchestra of internal organs can play many different symphonies during happiness, fear, and the rest. 2 6 You can see this variation easily in an experimental procedure used by laboratories around the world, where test subjects perform a difficult task such as counting backward by thirteen as fast as possible, or speaking about a polarizing topic like abortion or religion, while being ridiculed. As they struggle, the experimenter berates them for poor performance, making critical and even insulting remarks. Do all the test subjects get angry? No, they don’t. More importantly, those who do feel angry show different patterns of bodily changes. Some people fume in anger, but some cry. Others become quiet and cunning. Still others just withdraw. Each behavior (fuming, crying, planning, withdrawing) is supported by a different physiological pattern in the body, a detail long known by physiologists who study the body for its own sake. Even small changes in body posture, like lying back versus leaning forward with arms crossed, can completely alter an angry person’s physiological response. 2 7 When I address audiences at conferences and present these meta-analyses, some people become incredulous: “Are you saying that in a frustrating, humiliating situation, not everyone will get angry so that their blood boils and their palms sweat and their cheeks flush?” And my answer is yes, that is exactly what I am saying. As a matter of fact, earlier in my career, when I was giving my first talks about these ideas, you could see variations in anger firsthand in audience members who really didn’t like the evidence. Sometimes they would shift around in their seats.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  He was pushing the armrests up to make a bed for me. Then he ran his hand along the seats to indicate that this was a place to lie down. “I really don’t know if this is fair to the other people,” I said, feeling suddenly guilty to be hogging a whole compartment. But he hadn’t understood me and I couldn’t explain myself in French. “You are seule?” he asked again, flattening his palm on my belly and pushing me down toward the seat. Suddenly his hand was between my legs and he was trying to hold me down forcibly. “What are you doing?” I screamed, springing up and pushing him away. I knew very well what he was doing, but it had taken a few seconds to register. “You pig!” I spat out. He smiled crookedly and shrugged his shoulders, as if to say “no harm in trying.” “Cochon!” I yelled, translating for his benefit. He laughed weakly. He wasn’t exactly about to rape me, but neither did he understand my outrage. After all, I was alone, wasn’t I? With a burst of energy I leaped up on the seat and grabbed my suitcase, nearly bringing it down on my own head. I stormed out of the compartment while he just stood there smiling his crooked smile and shrugging. I was furious with myself for my credulity. How could I have thanked him for his consideration when any idiot would have known that he planned to grab me by the snatch as soon as the shades were drawn? I was really a fool—despite all my pretensions to worldliness. I was about as worldly as a goddamned eight year old. Isadora in Wonderland. The eternal naif. “Boy, are you stupid,” I said to myself as I stepped down the corridor in search of another compartment. I wanted a crowded one this time. One with nuns, or a family of twelve, or both. I was wishing I’d had the nerve to belt him one. If only I were one of those wise women who carry aerosol cans of Mace or study karate. Or maybe I needed a guard dog. A huge dog trained for every sort of service. It was likely to come in handier than a man. It wasn’t until I was settled, facing a nice little family group—mother, daddy, baby—that it dawned on me how funny that episode had been. My zipless fuck! My stranger on a train! Here I’d been offered my very own fantasy. The fantasy that had riveted me to the vibrating seat of the train for three years in Heidelberg and instead of turning me on, it had revolted me! Puzzling, wasn’t it? A tribute to the mysteriousness of the psyche. Or maybe my psyche had begun to change in a way I hadn’t anticipated. There was no longer anything romantic about strangers on trains.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Other times they shook their head in a silent “no.” Once a colleague yelled at me while his face turned red and he stabbed his finger in the air. Another colleague asked me, in a sympathetic tone, if I had ever felt real fear, because if I’d ever been seriously harmed, I would never be suggesting such a preposterous idea. Yet another colleague said he would tell my brother-in-law (a sociologist of his acquaintance) that I was damaging the science of emotion. My favorite example involved a much more senior colleague, built like a linebacker and towering a foot above me, who cocked his fist and offered to punch me in the face to demonstrate what real anger looks like. (I smiled and thanked him for the thoughtful offer.) In these examples, my colleagues demonstrated the variability of anger far more handily than my presentation did. What does it mean that four meta-analyses, summarizing hundreds of experiments, revealed no consistent, specific fingerprints in the autonomic nervous system for different emotions? It doesn’t mean that emotions are an illusion, or that bodily responses are random. It means that on different occasions, in different contexts, in different studies, within the same individual and across different individuals, the same emotion category involves different bodily responses. Variation, not uniformity, is the norm. These results are consistent with what physiologists have known for over fifty years: different behaviors have different patterns of heart rate, breathing, and so on to support their unique movements. 2 8 Despite tremendous time and investment, research has not revealed a consistent bodily fingerprint for even a single emotion. … My first two attempts to find objective fingerprints of emotion—in the face and body—had led me smack into a closed door. But as they say, when a door closes, sometimes a window opens. My window was the unexpected realization that an emotion is not a thing but a category of instances, and any emotion category has tremendous variety. Anger, for example, varies far more than the classical view of emotion predicts or can explain. When you’re angry at someone, do you shout and swear or do you seethe quietly? Do you tease back in reproach? How about widening your eyes and raising your eyebrows? During these times, your blood pressure might go up or down or stay the same. You might feel your heart beating in your chest, or not. Your hands might become clammy, or they might remain dry . . . whatever best prepares your body for action in that situation. How does your brain create and keep track of all these diverse angers? How does it know which one fits the situation best? If I asked how you felt in each of these situations, would you give a detailed answer like “aggravated,” “irritated,” “outraged,” or “vengeful” automatically with little effort?

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Where do these gender stereotypes come from? In the United States at least, women routinely “express” more emotion when compared to men. For example, women move their facial muscles more when watching films than men do, but women don’t report more intense experiences of emotion while watching. This finding, if nothing else, might explain why the stereotypes of the stoic man and the emotional woman leak into the courtroom and have a significant influence on judges and juries.18 Because of these stereotypes, heat-of-passion defenses—and legal proceedings in general—are often applied differently to male versus female defendants. Consider two murder cases that are pretty similar except for the sex of the defendant. In the first case, a man named Robert Elliott was convicted of killing his brother, allegedly because of “extreme emotional disturbance” that included “an overwhelming fear of his brother.” The jury found him guilty of murder but the decision was overturned by the Supreme Court of Connecticut, citing that Elliott’s “intense feelings” about his brother overwhelmed his “self-control” and “reason.” In the second case, a woman named Judy Norman killed her husband after he had systematically beaten and abused her for years. The Supreme Court of North Carolina rejected the defense’s claim that Norman was acting in self-defense out of “a reasonable fear of imminent death or great bodily harm,” and she remained convicted of voluntary manslaughter.19 These two cases match several stereotypes about emotion in men versus women. Anger is stereotypically normal for men because they are supposed to be aggressors. Women are supposed to be victims, and good victims shouldn’t become angry; they’re supposed to be afraid. Women are punished for expressing anger—they lose respect, pay, and perhaps even their jobs. Whenever I see a savvy male politician play the “angry bitch card” against a female opponent, I take it as an ironic sign that she must be really competent and powerful. (I have yet to meet a successful woman who hasn’t paid her dues as a “bitch” before she was accepted as a leader.)20 In courtrooms, angry women like Ms. Norman lose their liberty. In fact, in domestic violence cases, men who kill get shorter and lighter sentences, and are charged with less serious crimes, than are women who kill their intimate partners. A murderous husband is just acting like a stereotypical husband, but wives who kill are not acting like typical wives, and therefore they are rarely exonerated.21

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  I knew women like Mrs. Oleson when I was in high school; they were the conservative “Christian” mothers of people I was friends with, and the mothers of a lot of the boys who snapped bras and flipped up skirts. These women loudly proclaimed their views about how boys and girls were supposed to behave. One of them found my friend Jamie making out with her son; she blamed Jamie, saying, “I won’t tell your mother about this, if you promise it won’t happen again. Boys will be boys and there are other girls they can go to for that.” The twisted view of the two things women are supposedly for—either marriage or sex but not both—still makes me shudder. I saw the sexism and the hypocrisy in it, but the Mrs. Olesons of the world wielded too much power then. I couldn’t outshout them. It was hard enough being sexually assaulted at fifteen and raped at seventeen; compounding it was the mind-fuck perpetrated by people like these mothers who promoted the biblical view of women as tempters, of boys and men helpless against their lusty instincts at the sight of a woman, dividing women into Eves and Marys, whores and virgins. I felt betrayed by my gender; not only were men not to be trusted, but neither were women, apparently. There were, at least fictionally, the “Ellen Jamesians,” the women in John Irving’s The World According to Garp who cut out their tongues in solidarity with a woman whose tongue was cut out so she couldn’t identify her attackers after she was gang-raped. They were separatists. They wanted nothing to do with men; when Garp’s mother died, they wouldn’t even let him attend the memorial service held at the center she founded for troubled and abused women. These women, I thought, had each other’s backs. I encountered real separatists when I went to college, at Smith, but the jokes about two dead men at the bottom of the ocean being “a start” didn’t seem funny to me. There was, after all, still the saying “Smith to bed, Holyoke to wed”—more of the whore-or-virgin dichotomy. My first weekend as a college first-year (we were not “freshmen”), in a study carrel at the library, I saw that someone had drawn a picture of an erect penis, complete with balls and pubic hair, and written, “What could be more fun than a long hard one?” Someone else had scrawled underneath: “Cutting it off!” I could identify with neither sentiment: there was no pleasure in sex for me, nor did I hate men. I didn’t quite yet understand my collegiate landscape; it seemed to be an improvement over the misogyny I had left behind, but this men-for-sex-or-not-at-all worldview was not particularly uplifting either.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  Your genes gave you a brain that can wire itself to its physical and social environment. The people around you, in your culture, maintain that environment with their concepts and help you live in that environment by transmitting those concepts from their brains to yours. And later, you transmit your concepts to the brains of the next generation. It takes more than one human brain to create a human mind. What I have not yet explained, however, is how this all works inside the brain: the biology of categorization. What brain networks are involved? How is this process related to your brain’s intrinsic, predictive powers, and how does it affect your all-important body budget? That is what we’ll discuss next as you learn the final piece of the puzzle for how emotions are made in the brain. 6 How the Brain Makes Emotions Have you ever wanted to punch your boss? I would never advocate workplace violence, of course, and many bosses are terrific work partners. But sometimes we are blessed with supervisors who personify the German emotion word Backpfeifengesicht, meaning “a face in need of a fist.” Suppose you have such a boss, and he’s been handing you extra projects for almost a year. You’ve been expecting a promotion for all your good work, but he has just informed you that the promotion went to someone else. How would you feel? If you live in a Western culture, you’d likely feel angry. Your brain would issue numerous predictions of “Anger” simultaneously. One prediction might be to pound your fist on the desk and yell at your boss. Another is to stand up and walk slowly across the room toward your boss, leaning in menacingly to whisper, “You will regret this.” Or you could sit quietly in your chair as you scheme to undermine your boss’s career. 1 These diverse predictions of “Anger” have similarities, such as the boss, the lost promotion, and the common goal to exact vengeance. They also have plenty of differences, because yelling, whispering, and silence require different sensory and motor predictions. Your action also is different in each case (pounding, leaning, sitting), so your inner-body changes are different, as are the consequences for your body budget, and therefore the interoceptive and affective consequences are different as well. Ultimately, through a process we’ll discuss shortly, your brain selects a winning instance of “Anger” that best fits your goal in this particular situation. The winning instance determines how you behave and what you experience. This process is categorization. The scenario with your boss could play out differently, however. You could be angry with a different goal, like changing your boss’s mind, or maintaining social relations with the coworker who got the promotion in your place. Or you could construct an instance of a different emotion such as “Regret” or “Fear,” or a non-emotion like “Emancipation,” or a physical symptom like a “Headache,” or a perception that your boss is an “Idiot.”

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Reva had taken my pills, of course. I had no doubt. All she’d had left for me was a single dose of Benadryl in the foil blister, a one-inch square containing two measly antihistamines. I picked it up in disbelief and shut the door to the cabinet. My face in the mirror startled me. I leaned in and looked to see if it had shifted anymore since Dr. Tuttle’s weird assessment. I did look different. I couldn’t put my finger on how, but there was something that hadn’t been there before. What was it? Had I entered the new dimension? Ridiculous. I opened the cabinet again. The pills had not magically reappeared. I’d never known Reva to be so bold. Maybe I’d tried to hide the pills from myself, I thought. I started opening drawers and cabinets in the hallway, in the kitchen. I hoisted myself up and stood on the counter, looking into the back reaches of the shelves. There was nothing there. I looked in the bedroom, in the drawer of my bedside table, under my bed. I pulled everything out of the closet, found nothing, and piled everything back in. I sifted through my drawers. I went back into the living room and unzipped the cases of the sofa cushions. Maybe I’d stuffed the pills inside the frame, I thought. But why would I do that? I found my phone charging in the bedroom and called Reva. She didn’t answer. “Reva,” I said into her voice mail. She was a coward, I thought. She was an idiot. “Are you a medical doctor? Are you some kind of expert? If my shit isn’t back in that medicine cabinet by tonight, we are done. Our friendship is over. I will never want to see you again. That is, if I’m even alive. Did it occur to you that you might not know the whole story behind my condition? And that there would be harmful consequences if I just all of a sudden stopped taking my medicine? If I don’t take it, I could go into seizures, Reva. Aneurysms. Neurotic shock. OK? Total cellular collapse! You’d feel pretty sorry if I died because of you. I don’t know how you’d live with yourself then. How much puke and StairMaster would it take to get over something like that, huh? You know that killing someone you love is the ultimate self-destructive act. Grow up, Reva. Is this a cry for help? It’s pretty fucking pathetic, if it is. Anyway, call me back. I’m waiting. And honestly, I don’t feel very well.” I took the two Benadryl, sat back down on the sofa and turned on the television. “In a sweeping vote of one hundred to zero, the Senate has confirmed Mitch Daniels as director of the White House Office of Management and Budget for the freshly minted Bush administration. Fifty-one-year-old Daniels has been a senior vice president for Eli Lilly and Company, the Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical giant.” I turned the channel.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  It seemed now that the statue raped him both through his anus and through his mouth, and he was bound to it. And his organ, as stiff as before, lay thrust forward as the phallus of the statue was inside of him. "Now, you are perhaps a little more used to your Prince Alexi," said the Prince softly. "But this is so terrible," Beauty thought, "that he must spend the night in this misery." Prince Alexi's back was painfully arched, his legs bound wide apart, and the moonlight from the window behind him made a long line down his throat, his smooth chest and his flat belly. The Prince tugged gently on Beauty's hair which he held wrapped around his right hand and leading her back to bed, he laid her down and told her to sleep, as he would soon be doing beside her. PRINCE ALEXI AND FELIX IT WAS almost dawn. The Prince lay deep asleep. And Beauty who had been waiting for his heavy sleeping breaths, slipped out of the bed, and on all fours, out of stealth, not obedience, crept into the corridor. She had lain for a long time looking at the door, seeing that it had never been really shut, and she might make her small escape without noise if she only had the courage. She crept to the top of the steps. The light fell full on Prince Alexi, and she could see that his organ was rigid as before, and Squire Felix was talking to him, softly. She could not hear what the Squire said, but she was furious to see him awake. She had hoped that he too would now be sleeping. And as she watched, quite unknown to Squire Felix, she saw him come round in front of Prince Alexi, and torment the organ again with a volley of slaps that sounded very loud in the empty stairwell. The captive Price gave a little moan, and Beauty could see his chest heave with his breath. Squire Felix walked back and forth restlessly. Then he looked at the Prince, and it seemed he turned his head from left to right as though listening. Beauty held her breath. She was terrified she might be discovered. Squire Felix drew near to Prince Alexi and putting his arms around his hips, he covered Prince Alexi's organ with his mouth and began sucking it. Beauty was beside herself with frustration and anger. This was just what she had meant to do. She had imagined herself braving all dangers to do it. And now she was forced to watch as Squire Felix tormented the poor Prince. But to her surprise, Squire Felix was not merely tantalizing Prince Alexi. Squire Felix seemed quite in earnest. He was ravaging the organ with a regular rhythm and Beauty knew from the moans that Prince Alexi couldn't conceal he was now reaching the climax of his passion.