How We Become What We Are - Fear Aggression Boldness
Like the ghost in the machine or the mind in the brain, temperament is best glimpsed in action. To discern it, watch a person communicate, says Hagop Akiskal, the senior science adviser on affective and related disorders at the National Institute of Mental Health: “ It’s not just a matter of personality but something more basic that has to do with rhythm, reactivity, emotion.” Of all species, Homosapiens has the most feelings. Just as drives such as hunger and sleep are more flexible than reflexes like the eye blink and knee jerk, emotions, which are physiological as well as psychological events, give us more behavioral options than do drives. Some emotions are so basic and universal that the psychologist Hans Eysenck, a pioneer of the modern biological study of personality, who conducts research in London at the Institute of Psychiatry, believes that they’re nothing less than the lowest common denominators of human experience. “We’ve done our studies in thirty-six countries,” he says, “and everywhere we find the same three ways in which behavior can differ.” To varying degrees all people express fear, which helps us avoid danger; aggression, which enables us to fight it; and extraversion, or sociability, which enables us to face it with equanimity. Fundamentally, our temperaments are distinguished by the traits of anxiety, irritability and elan.
That our natures are organized around our habitual reactions to threat has given Philip Gold, a research psychiatrist who is the chief of the neuroendocrinolgy branch of the NIMH, a “tragic view of the human condition.” Physical or emotional, real or perceived, danger lurks everywhere, and from an evolutionary perspective our species’ great asset and, sometimes, liability is an extremely sensitive emotional and physiological arousal system that detects and reacts to it. This is the stress, or “fight or flight”, response. The stable sorts of people whom modern researchers describe as uninhibited, bold, or relaxed can cope with life’s vicissitudes—from a snake in the jungle to a fire-breathing boss—in a manner Gold describes as “philosophical,” because their stress response isn’t triggered by every little thing and doesn’t stay on red alert longer than necessary. These resilient people are innately disposed, Gold says, “to celebrate the beauty of existence and wonders of any interior life and external connections despite being surrounded by unanswerable questions, ambiguous dilemmas, and the certainty of loss and death.”
Those who naturally react to the threatening or the merely unfamiliar with an excess of either the flight or the fight response are in for more trouble. Because their stress response spikes frequently and ebbs slowly. Hippocrates’ melancholic’s, whom scientist now describe as anxious, inhibited, or reactive, are so worn down that they are apt to behave in what Gold calls a depressive way: “Faced with a setback,. For example, they say it occurred because they’re worthless.” To protect themselves, the flight-prone often cultivate an avoidant way of life that worsens their plight. “They’re likelier to survive in truly threatening situations,” Gold says, “but they have less comfortable lives.” Hippocrates’ choleric's, like Willy and Burton, respond to stress by gong into fight mode. To these people, whom researchers variously call aggressive, impulsive, or irritable, the dark possibility of pain and defeat is to intense, Gold says, “that they can’t bear to be accountable for it in a depressive way.” Instead they blame it on others, and strike out. Although the bias toward one of these fundamental emotional tones, or temperaments, “has to do with what a person has learned he has to be in order to be loved,” Gold says, “it also has to do with genetic factors that biologically predispose him to respond in a certain way to the paradigmatic human situations of pleasure and opportunity, danger and loss,.” He continues, “In the blood-and-guts world of challenges, these differences in the stress response account for the fundamental parameters of what people are like.”
Although some people are so colored by a single emotional tone that they’re said to be the inhibited, uninhibited, or aggressive type, most temperaments aren’t primary yellow, blue or red. Their many subtle shades include greens, oranges, and violets blended from lots of different genetic proclivities. Kagan predicts that future research will define many more dispositions and traits, or temperamental characteristics, each with its own physiological substrates; a likely example is a familiar permutation of the reactive temperament known as the obsessive type. What most people consider occasional thought or pursuits rivet the neural arousal system of the genius, the collector, and the artist, who vent their obsessions in compulsive activity. Reflecting on Benny Goodman’s notorious social insensitivity, a wise musician from his band observed that the celebrated clarinetist, who practices his instrument eight hours a day, thought not about people but out fingering.
Although scientists disagree about the ultimate number of traits and the temperaments they color, most of the research concerns the three most obvious qualities: fearfulness, boldness, and aggressiveness. Just as the scars that laced Burton’s body speak of the way aggressive people operate in the world, the lives of two of his eminent Victorian contemporaries say something about the approaches of he inhibited and uninhibited temperaments. The Queen whose name is synonymous with the effort to dampen arousal described the clockwork progress of an ideal day in the company of her beloved husband: “We walked in the garden…At twelve o’clock we had prayers in the drawing-room, which were read by a young clergyman, who preached a good sermon….I read to Albert the first three cantos of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, which delighted us both: and then we looked over some curious, fine old prints by Ridinger.” Yet even Victoria had days when novelty intruded on her careful plans, trying her sensitive nerves. Despite the efforts of maids and courtiers in a posh Highlands lodge, some missing luggage caused her a rougher night than Burton would have passed in a pestilent swamp: “I dislike the idea of going to be without any of the necessary toilette,” she wrote in her diary. “However, some arrangements were made which were very uncomfortable; and after two I got into bed, but had very little sleep at first; finally, fatigue got the better of discomfort, and after three I fell asleep.”
The nocturnal arrangements of Victoria’s subject the Honorable Jane Digby El Mezrab , who also doted on her husband—at least, on her fourth one—would have greatly perturbed Victoria. With Sheikh Medjuel El Mezrab, this well-traveled, much-married lady passed half each year in a Bedoin tent in the Syrian desert. Arab robes flying and blue eyes rimmed with kohl, she raced camels and horses, went falconing, and even accompanied her lord and master into battle; in quieter moments she served him at meals and washed his feet. After more than decades of their flared-nostril life, taken up well past the point at which Victoria had abandoned herself to inconsolable widowhood, Jane wrote, “Sixty-two years of age, and an impetuous romantic girl of seventeen cannot exceed me in ardent passionate feelings.” Like her Queen, Jane focused on her domestic life, but how she did so throbs with the uninhibited temperament.
