Psychological Aspects of the Expression of Anger and Violence on the Stage

Authors

Vladimir J. Konečni, University of California at San Diego

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph of the essay follows:

Since the publication of Charles Darwin's The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872 and William James' Psychology in 1890,¹ there has been a steady accumulation of experimental evidence regarding the perception and expression of emotion. It can safely be said that "emotion," along with "mind" and "behavior," stands as one of the three central concepts of psychology. It is also a concept that may be located at the intersect of a large number of psychological subdisciplines, including: social psychology (in terms of the communication of emotions and their origin in social situations); psychophysiology (in terms, for example, of electromyographic recording of facial muscle movements and the measurement of autonomic arousal - heart rate, blood pressure, galvanic skin response, etc.); ethology and the psychology of learning (in terms of the biologically important behaviors mediated by acute, pronounced emotional states); cognitive psychology (in terms of the importance of interpretation and other cognitive operations in the appraisal of the meaning of emotion-relevant situations as well as of the evaluation of internal cues one carries out when deciding which emotion, if any, one is experiencing); developmental psychology (in terms of parent-infant bonding and teaching of prosocial emotions as one of the key goals of socialization); and clinical psychology (in terms of maladaptive emotional states such as irrational fears, manic-depressive states, and so on).

Recommended Citation

Konečni, Vladimir J. (1991) "Psychological Aspects of the Expression of Anger and Violence on the Stage," Comparative Drama: Vol. 25: Iss. 3, Article 1.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol25/iss3/1