Neurotics, anger, and problems in any relationship!
Big Five Test
One test that reveals if you're high in neuroticism is the Big Five test commonly used by psychologists around the world to determine the personalities of an individual.
You can click on the underlined word and it will take you to the test itself. But you have to copy the result if you want to save it elsewhere to read up on it and understand your personality better later on.
It’s in English.
I highly recommend you take the test because it gives you good knowledge about your personality so that you know what obstacles you probably have and will encounter in life.
The Need To Belong and Gut Feeling
From a broader perspective, there is no good or bad personality since all combinations are needed in society. But it might explain why you feel that you are in the right line of work/relationship or not. When it comes to relationships, humans have a strong psychological drive for The Need to Belong and when it comes to personality, humans rarely match too far apart in personality traits. That will probably trigger the well-known “gut feeling” that something isn’t right with a person. Be aware that the gut feeling only indicates that something is different to you and that the other person might be very good even though your heightened sense of Anxiety (or paranoia) might be giving you a bad response in the form of a bad gut feeling.
Your personality is constant during your life and does not change. But not so for the group that is born high in neuroticism. As you are born your genes determine how and if you will get angry and the time it takes from the trigger to the feeling coming into effect. And yes, there are people in the world who do not get angry at all. As you grow older your experiences increase and you start to question your neurotic personality, if you are high in that category. That mostly results in a decrease in neuroticism and feelings of anger along with the other subcategories. The subcategories of neuroticism are as follows. Anxiety, Anger, Depression, Self-Consiousness, Immoderation and Vulnerability. I will only address Anger and the implications of that feeling in relationships.
The feeling of “Anger”
According to Paul Ekman in his book “Emotions Revealed”, originally published in 2003. Anger is a feeling and feelings are semi semi-open system that looks like a reaction with a trigger followed by a refractory period that lasts between one second to several hours. In the later state of hours, it is followed by the problem that it biases the way we see the world and ourselves.
Logical thinking (central route) and emotional (peripheral route) thinking use different routes in the human brain according to the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM). The Central route (logical) of cognitive decision-making uses glucose in the brain and is therefore always second to the Peripheral route (emotions and simplest solution) to save energy for the individual. Peripheral Rout which fake news and propaganda use to win people’s minds. Thus, the witch hunt, etc. It begs the question if diets like Keto or LCHF diets that do not include glucose might influence the brain towards more emotional decision making thus decreasing logical thinking and therefore hampering the questioning of logical development in therapy due to the diet. But that is a speculation and for someone else to research on.
When a person is stuck feeling anger for several hours it alters the reality for that individual since it can’t access any other information or memory that would support another feeling other than anger or shed light on the situation for perspective and logical thinking.
The other bad side of anger is that people can import memories that it has had with others that strengthen the current feeling of anger towards the person in front of them. Even though the memory has nothing to do with the person that the person is angry at in this particular moment.
“An Eye for an Eye” and retaliation
Another problem with the feeling of anger, according to Paul Ekman, is that it always without mercy brings forth the need for, in one way or another, retaliation.
Emotions, according to science, are bound by the old ways of “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. What it means in everyday life is that if you make a person angry or they get angry at you for any reason. You will in some way get retaliation from that person one way or another. That might explain the known expression “Happy Wife, Happy Life!”.
So even though psychologists say that there are no bad combinations of personalities and there are about 243 different combinations of personalities in the world if you calculate the combinations of the Big Five test each trait has the possible value of Low, Average, or High.
The traits themselves can result in problems in relationships that lead to bad outcomes every time due to your personality. I would argue that anger within the neurotic group is one of those bad traits in relationships.
Then again anger is a good thing if you need to resort to anger when in a hostile environment for jobs like being a soldier or security guard. But in everyday life, not so much.
It is therefore sad that people with a heightened anger trait and the people they interact with suffer in life due to the genetic predisposition to anger. But it, sadly, explains a lot of why the world looks the way it does in the year 2020.
Implications of Anger
So what are the implications of being high in anger? Well in any relationship there is a cost-benefit ratio that each person in the relationship follows. Since anger results in retaliation in every case and adds to the cost side of the ratio. Eventually, the relationship will, most likely, fail because the behavior will get back at the person over and over again. Since most people have mirror neurons (some argue that psychopaths do not) the very act of retaliation or displayed anger triggers the feeling of anger in the receiving person due to its mirror neurons. Then it becomes a loop of anger and retaliation within the relationship. Thus the expression “be vary of which side of your personality you give energy to”.
If you feed your anger then you will most probably be stuck in a loop of anger and retaliation. But if you become aware through taking the test that you are high in anger and therefore might be angry for hours then now you know that it might be altering the way you see yourself and the world around you. That in turn can help you take action in seeking professional help and or start to question your behaviour and make instant changes. You might know someone who is displaying anger issues and help them to understand by nudging.
Anger and memory
While being stuck in the refractory period of anger the memories that you store in your brain will also be altered significantly compared to memories stored in your brain during time when you're not experiencing a feeling. Good advice is not to trust what you remember from times when you have been emotional since they are not what happened. This is also a problem with people who are high in the anger trait since what they remember of events when feeling anger is most likely not what happened in reality. Adding to the biases that influence the way we see the world and ourselves. Yes, this touches on the possibility that what you hear as a high-in “angered” person describing what happened might sound insane to another person being present in that exact moment and experiencing the same situation. Please remember that acting angry does not necessarily coincide with the person being high in anger as a personality trait. So please do not judge a person from one experience. You will most likely make the Othello error or fall for the Dunning-Kruger- effect.
The importance of all this?
If you are a manager you need to understand these psychological aspects of a human being so that you do not fall victim to a person who tells you a story that renders you biased through anchoring which in turn hurts another person at your workplace. When you date someone, this too is important to understand since it can lead to heartache further down the road.
Personality traits do matter in everyday life and it affects us all in one way or another. If you want to make a difference in your lifetime with family and friends or your workplace then this should be common knowledge.
Good luck on your journey and I hope this gave you a wee bit of insight into the feeling of anger and its implication in life and relationships.
