Martin Phipps wrote:
> blakg...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
>> The more s*****nin, the better a person feels, and
>> people who feel good don't tend to get aggressive.
>
> That makes sense. When I feel pissed I want to hit something.
>
> The fact that men have different shaped brains makes a lot of sense
> too.
Well, the brains are shaped about the same, it's just that the centers
of activity are of different sizes.
> I'm not sure if aggression is simply a question of being unable to
> control your emotions, however: nor is it necessarily particularly
> healthy to bottle up your emotions and never let them out.
It's very much about controlling your emotions. With brain scans, they
can see by the electrical activity in the brain that everybody gets
pissed off at things (unless there's a dysfunction in the amygdala
region of the brain). Aggressive people just seem to have an inability
to restrain themselves. This affects more men than women because of
the, on average, smaller frontal cortex in men.
The amygdala is the center of emotions. It's basically telling you to
rip a person's head off when they piss you off. But the frontal cortex
is telling you to see reason--you'll end up getting hurt, you'll go to
jail, violence doesn't solve the problem, etc. Controlling emotions
doesn't mean bottling them up. It can, and that's not good, but
venting emotions in constructive ways is controlling your emotions as
well.
> It's ironic, I suppose, that the men who always seemed the most in
> control are often the ones who snap and commit the most brutal
> crimes.
I don't know if they commit the most brutal crimes, but generally, the
brain isn't very good when it comes to intense multitasking. The more
extreme the emotional outburst, the less the other regions of the
brain will get used. So, when a person gets blinded by their emotions,
the frontal cortex shuts down. I'd imagine that someone who usually
controls their emotions doesn't know what to do when their emotions
run amok.
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