Politics and the global pandemic are making headlines every day and with the election just days away, we thought we could have a cool and collective conversation about anger and fear.

What is anger?

According to the Encyclopedia of Psychology, anger is an emotion characterized by antagonism toward someone or something you feel has deliberately done you wrong.

Anger can be a good thing. It can give you a way to express negative feelings, or help you to find solutions to problems.

Excessive anger can cause problems. Increased blood pressure and other physical changes associated with anger make it difficult to think straight and harm your physical and mental health.

The experience of anger is different for each person in regard to how intensely the person feels it. Less than 2% of Americans experience uncontrolled anger that requires psychological treatment.

Attorney and philosopher Martha Nussbaum proposes in her book, “The Monarchy of Fear” that the fundamental political emotion is fear, which contributes to other emotions such as anger, disgust and envy.

Emotions are causally interconnected, with one emotion tending to lead to another. If you fear someone, you may become angry that they have made you fearful.

The charts below are from a recent survey by the Pew Research Center on emotions about the 2020 election.

According to a New York Times poll conducted in June, 81% Biden supporters 18-34 are angry about the state of America today while 43% of Trump supporters say they are angry.

Anger portrait

The darker the shade the more anger.

The world map gives a loose look at anger around the world by a Google Cloud Vision API, processing the density of recognized human faces in news imagery deemed as expressing anger. The program analyzed millions of images from Dec. 28, 2015, to Jan. 11, 2016.

Keep your composure

A guide created for Psychology Today by Leon F. Seltzer, PhD., helps monitor your anger level as a way of regaining your composure.

Sources: Pew Research Center, Google Cloud Vision API, American Psychological Association, NBC News, Esquire, Forbes