![]() ![]() It is characterised by a negative valence, and is correlated with approach behaviour, typically aimed at confronting the target of anger, be it to seek revenge, apology, deterrence or rectification for the offence. It involves blaming targets other than the emoting agent (such as your mother, your boss, or the patriarchy) for offences or injustices. Typical or paradigmatic anger is other-directed. Let’s look at paradigmatic cases of anger and see how self-anger measures up. We cannot go on name alone, we need an account of the nature of the emotion to determine whether it really is a type of anger and what exactly distinguishes it from other negative ‘reflexive’, or self-directed, emotions such as guilt and shame. So, what is self-anger? As the name suggests, it seems to be a type of anger, but sometimes names can be deceiving. To investigate the function of self-anger, we need to take a closer look at its nature. That there be an overlap in eliciting situations is no reason to ignore the emotion of self-anger, however, and if we keep neglecting the emotion, we will never find out if it has an important or distinctive role to play in our lives. Indeed, it might be appropriate to feel ashamed for forgetting about a deadline, or for failing to profess your love to someone, and certainly if you’ve locked out not only yourself, but also your family, you might feel guilt as well as self-anger. ![]() Perhaps it is because it can get mixed up with feelings of shame and guilt, two emotions that are often triggered by the same sorts of situations. Despite self-directed anger being a relatively common emotion in everyday life, it has escaped the attention of both philosophers and psychologists. When you lock yourself out of the house, forget about an important deadline or miss your chance to tell someone how you feel about them, you may justifiably get angry at yourself. Sometimes we have only ourselves to blame for what happens to us. ![]()
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