Emotions are generated by a person's thinking patterns and responses to their environment, experts say. (Photo: Li Hao/GT)
For 31-year-old Tracy Fang, the memory of a scary afternoon last month when she had a fight with her boyfriend, is still vivid in her mind. It was not the fight that scared her, but her behavior.
They were locked in a cold war for days. The conflict began when the two were making a decision on where to go for their honeymoon. Fang wanted to travel abroad, while her boyfriend preferred to stay closer to home and save the extra money for the loan on their house. Fang was disappointed.
"Maybe we should separate for a while," she said, sitting in the passenger seat as they drove to her boyfriend's parents' house. Her boyfriend is a quiet person and when he did not respond, it made her even angrier.
"I didn't really want to break up, I just wanted to scare him, and when it seemed like he didn't care, I lost my temper and I could not control myself," she recalled. "I screamed and ordered him to stop the car, but he wouldn't listen."
Then she suddenly opened the car door. Her boyfriend panicked and stretched out his arm and clenched onto her hair and they both continued to scream at each other on the highway.
Fang, struck by fear, realized how dangerous her actions were and calmed down. "I was wearing the safety belt so I was not thrown out of the car. During the fight, our car only swerved ahead a short distance and luckily there were not many cars around," she said.
Although she has been short-tempered since childhood and believed she was born irritable, Fang made the decision to use self-discipline to control her emotions after the highway incident. Her determination has been strengthened by a recent incident in the news.
According to a report by news portal xinmin.cn, one woman was killed, and another injured in a tiger attack at Beijing Badaling Wildlife World, by exiting the self-driven car during a safari on July 23.
The report said the group consisted of a husband and wife, their son, and the wife's mother. As they were driving through the tiger zone, a fight allegedly broke out between the couple and the wife became furious. According to the surveillance video, the woman opened the door and went around to the driver's side where her husband was. It looked as if she was telling him to open the door and get out. This is when the tiger attacked. Her mother came to her rescue, but was attacked by another tiger and died, according to a witness.
Shen Dianzhong, a research fellow at Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, said in a May 27 report of people.cn that inability to control emotions has become a social phenomenon in modern China, and has been a contributing factor for many unpleasant events.
Sun Hao, a Beijing-based psychologist, shares Shen's opinion, saying that frequent failure to control one's own emotions shows poor mental health, and puts one at risk for other mental disorders such as bipolar disorder.
Where does it come from?
Fang said her boyfriend knows she is easily irritated and always gets road rage, so he did not let her drive that day.
"If I was driving, I may have driven directly off the highway and caused a crash," she said. "I really don't know what causes my loss of control, genes or environment?"
According to Sun, it is due to both genetic characteristics and learned behavior. "Our emotions come from the way we think, and sometimes we cannot control our response to a certain thing, and it just happens."
Sun said people who are self-centered or manipulative are more likely to lose control.
"Generally, selfish and manipulative people lose their temper easily when they fail to control the situation, and they tend to act in the moment, regardless of the consequences, and end up hurting themselves and others."
People who lack respect for others or others' personal space can also easily get lost in negative emotions, she said.
Another source of rage, said Sun, is from people's subconscious. Sun said one of her clients, a middle-aged woman, is deeply affected by the fact that when she was young, many men in her family, including her father, had affairs. The fear was seeded so deep in her mind, but she did not realize it until her husband divorced her because of her physical and verbal abuse. "She transferred the fear of infidelity to a desire to attack, and the most likely victim was her husband," Sun said.
Emotions, especially negative ones, can be brought on by other people's emotions. Shen said in the people.cn report that they studied a case where a mentally ill patient injured random children in a kindergarten. The case was broadcast nationally, and in one month, the amount of children being injured went up.
"Negative emotions from the first incident were passed on to others who could relate to the attacker and were on the verge of a breakdown," Shen said. "Emotions can be contagious especially in certain circumstances, including a traffic jam, severe temperatures and crowded public places, so in large cities like Beijing, people tend to have shorter tempers, and easily pass on negative emotions."
