Introduction
In trying to understand how aggression works, as well as aggressive emotions like anger, I decided to go to the animal literature. Human psychology research is all too prone to being determined by researchers’ preconceptions, and we all have a lot of firsthand experience and personal agendas when it comes to theorizing about human behavior. It’s easier to get some distance when thinking about animals; we have less stake in any particular theory of how animal emotions work. It’s also easier to set up experimental conditions with animals that would be hard to do ethically with humans, like keeping them in confinement and exposing them to stressors.