Take a closer look on anger, aggression, and violence.
Anger is typically characterised as an ‘approach’ emotion, meaning it is an emotion that helps a person to address threat or overcome barriers to achieve a particular goal (Carver & Harmon-Jones, 2009). In removing the barriers to achieve a goal, anger is a motivator or mobiliser of productive action. Anger can thus drive different types of behaviour. However, aggression or violence are not the same as anger. Aggression is generally considered a behaviour that is intended to cause physical or psychological harm to another person. Violence is more likely to refer to an extreme form of aggression that has intentional injury as its primary goal. On a continuum of severity, we have relatively minor acts of aggression on one end and violence at the other end (Allen & Anderson, 2017). It is very common for anger to be experienced without accompanying aggression or violence and, conversely, for anger not to be the motivator of aggressive or violent behaviour. In some cases, we c...