Mirror, mirror

As a cat mom, I’ve learned that whenever I take a step backwards, I need to slide my foot rather than step so I don’t end up landing on someone’s paw or tail.

This usually works … except for that one night when I forgot and took a step back, right onto poor Nicholaus’s tail. He let out a scream and before I knew it all the cats were puffed up like Halloween decorations, hissing and yowling and batting at one another in a feline bar-room brawl right there in my kitchen!

The many faces of compassion

Yet, even as I began profusely apologizing to everyone, I knew I was witnessing a case of redirected aggression, fueled by their fight/flight response after hearing Nick scream.

Aggression is an interesting subject. So is anger. When we teach anger management at work, one of the first questions we ask is, “How would you define anger?” A lot of times we hear about a time so-and-so did something and, “I got mad …” “Is anger the same as aggression?” we ask.

Most reply they’ve never thought about that, but they’re not the same thing and they don’t always show up together. Anger is an emotion, triggered by some event where we’ve been threatened or harmed physically, mentally or emotionally. Aggression is a behavior, one of the possible reactions to having been threatened or harmed. It might show up as a hard-wired fight/flight response or as a learned behavior, possibly the only reaction you’ve ever seen or experienced in your environment so it’s all you know.

Anger’s cousin, hostility, is an attitude, usually a chronic one. Whether they’re plagued by genetics, brain injury or other mental or physical health issues, hostile people are like walking trip wires; it doesn’t take much to set them off.

Beyond the definitions of anger, aggression and hostility, the ways they play out in humans and animals, individually or within societies, is pretty fascinating. In the case of my stepping on Nick’s tail, the cascade of chemicals in my cats’ fight/flight response demanded some resolution or expression; some way to release that chemical wash and get their bodies back into balance.

Not having an obvious source to direct their actions toward, the only targets available were each other. Luckily it lasted less than a minute and then they were fine. The psychological term for how another’s state of mind can affect us is “emotional contagion,” a phenomenon caused by mirror neurons in our brains that tune in to others’ emotions via sounds like screams or shouts; facial expressions like anger or grief; and actions such as yelling or hitting.

This is why we cry at sad movies, and laugh when we hear someone else laughing. Unfortunately, anger is contagious too, and, as it turns out, it’s even more contagious than positive emotions like joy and happiness.

Researchers believe this is due to our evolutionary survival instincts ­— we simply tune in to and react faster and more intensely to threats than we do to positive feelings or events - and it takes us longer to release those fight/flight chemicals once they start surging through our bodies.

This process gets magnified in group settings because those mirror neurons start resonating together and pretty soon everyone is either laughing, crying, or, if there’s anger or a threat present, shouting and fighting. In animal behavior, the incident in my kitchen is a tiny example of the latter. In people we may see “herd behavior” (following the crowd) or worse yet, gang violence and/or mob mentality.

Due in part to the feeling of “safety in numbers,” people will do things in a group they would never think of doing on their own, things like cheering on a bully who’s beating up some kid on the playground, going on a gang-inspired shooting spree,.. or attacking the U.S. Capital in 2020.

In the end, the best defense against getting caught up in rampant incidents of anger and aggression is having an understanding of what’s actually happening. That awareness can give us the opportunity to step back for a moment and think about what our options are. That’s the “management” part of anger management; knowing first off that we’re programmed to react to threats more intensely, and then setting boundaries, limiting our intake of information that we already know upsets us, and choosing our own battles.

It takes practice but if we understand how all this plays out in animals and in ourselves, we can better manage our responses and hopefully keep them, and ourselves, from suffering further harm.

(Colleen Dougherty is a writer, educator, artist and behavioral health therapist. She has worked and volunteered in animal welfare for more than 20 years, and has spoken at several animal welfare conferences. She holds degrees in art and counseling therapy, and graduate certificates in eco-psychology and humane education. Her passion is fostering joyful and respectful relationships between animals, humans and the earth. She’s been writing Paw it Forward since 2016.)