The Effect Of Anger On Depression And Its Electrophysiological Characteristics

Anger is an emotional response to existential threat or other stressful events,and it has biological,psychological and social adaptive functions related to survival.Depression is a chronic disease,and it is the leading emotional disease faced by human beings.Studies have shown a strong correlation between anger and depression in both normal and clinical population.Despite the link between anger and depression,anger has often been overlooked in studies of the depression process.Traditional Chinese medicine believes that the main cause of depression comes from the suppression of anger,and the organ of anger is the liver,so depression is called "liver depression".The classical theory of catharsis holds that catharsis is helpful to emotional regulation,but in recent years,some researchers put forward the viewpoint of potential harm of catharsis.So far,there have been few experimental studies on the relationship between anger and depression.Therefore,from the perspectives of trait anger and state anger,this study explored the relationship between trait anger and depression,as well as the influence of different expressions of state anger on depression and its neuroelectrophysiological characteristics.In the first study,a questionnaire study was conducted to explore the relationship between trait anger and depression,to reveal different depression with different trait anger levels.Questionnaire results showed that trait anger was positively correlated with depression level.Further analysis of the relationship between trait anger and individual coping style found that trait anger was significantly positively correlated with negative coping style,and significantly negatively correlated with positive coping style.This indicates that individuals with high trait anger may be less good at rational control of anger,and tend to adopt negative coping methods to aggravate anger.As a result,failure in coping may lead to sadness,thus depression.In study 2,event-related potential technique was used in combination with visual dual-selection Oddball task,and a three-level single-factor design was conducted among randomly grouped subjects,and the participants were asked to express different emotions.The effects of different anger expression modes on depressive emotions and their neuroelectrophysiological characteristics were investigated.The subjective report results showed that the level of depression,negative emotion and positive emotion did not change significantly in the anger suppression group,while the level of depression and negative emotion increased in the anger catharsis group,while the level of positive emotion decreased.This indicates that anger catharsis is worse than anger suppression in the influence and regulation of depression.In the event related potential results,the anger catharsis group induced a larger N200 peak amplitude in the frontal area than the anger suppression group,while the P300 peak amplitude was not significantly different between the groups.The results suggest that N200 may have higher sensitivity than P300.Therefore,the N200 component may be more suitable to be considered as an effective biomarker to distinguish depressive mood changes and provide a reference for the early diagnosis of depression.In conclusion,this study analyzed the relationship between trait anger and depressive mood from the perspective of trait anger and state anger,and further explored the influence of different expressions of state anger on depressive mood and its neuroelectrophysiological characteristics.The results of this study indicate that people with high trait anger may need to pay attention to take measures to deal with the stress scenes such as anger and adopt a more positive coping style.Intense outbursts of anger can be a trigger for depression,and people’s choice of different ways of expressing anger may need to be re-evaluated.