Temper temper

Do you ever fly into a violent fury with a total stranger? You bet you do. Emma Cook reports that nice people have road rage - and golf and phone rage - all the time

Roger wasn't a happy man. On one of the hottest days last summer he was stuck in a traffic jam in the middle of London with two "idiot drivers" in front of him, blocking the road and refusing to give way. "What the hell are you doing?" he boomed out of the window. The two drivers took no notice, so Roger shouted at them again. "Just f--k off mate," one of them yelled back. "It's none of your f--king business."

Roger is an impeccably dressed City stockbroker in his early thirties. He describes the next five minutes as "a bit of a blur ... at that moment, I felt something explode inside my head". He seems bemused as he recalls his actions. "It was so hot I knew I had to get out of the car. I was fuming and sickened at the thought of the two men's stupidity. I went over to one of them, held him by the scruff of the neck and screamed in his face something along the lines of 'If you don't move now, I'll f-- king move you.'" Then he approached the other motorist who swiftly - and wisely - reversed before Roger could reach his open window. While neither as brutal nor as tragic as the "road rage" incidents that ended in a fatal stabbing on the M25 a fortnight ago, and in a shooting in north London on Monday, Roger's nevertheless ballistic outbreak barely raised an eyebrow when he related the event to close friends. "They seem to think it's quite normal," he says. "Some of them have been on the receiving end in a similar situation and a few, like me, lost control. They were as shocked by their anger as I was." What alarmed Roger was the unpredictability of his response. There was no slow build-up, no warning signals. "One minute I felt annoyed but in control. The next I wanted to physically harm someone. I was so enraged nothing would have penetrated my brain."

Losing control - the irrational response that by-passes thought - appears to be an increasingly common response to modern living. The media have labels for each type of irrational anger: road rage, golf rage, trolley rage, cycle rage, even phone rage. The assumption is that 20th century conditions are to blame; a deadly cocktail of inhuman external circumstances: long working hours, individual alienation, over-populated cities and choked roads.

But is this sort of anger confined to cities? There has been no full- scale research, but there is some evidence that it may be just as much a feature of the small "sleepy" village as it is a consequence of fast- paced metropolitan life. "Stress is an easy excuse," says Jo Ellen Grzyb, psychotherapist and director of The Impact Factory, a company that runs "anger management" courses. "It really comes down to the individual's ability to deal with feelings as they are happening. You're just as likely to see anger in rural settings. There isn't the level of violence or acting out because there simply isn't the same amount of people. But proportionally it's just the same." Psychology professor John Groeger of the University of Surrey agrees: "It's more likely to be evident in urban situations but that doesn't mean it's actually more prevalent. You may get people in the countryside driving about and feeling very angry. But fewer people are likely to see them."

This comes as no surprise to Laura, 28, who lives in a small Suffolk village. Usually shy and quietly spoken, she astonished herself a few weeks ago when she lost her temper in a railway car park. "My dad was picking me up from the station and I was in the passenger seat. A florist's van was blocking our exit." When she asked the driver to move, he stuck two fingers up at her. "I leant out of the window and started yelling. Suddenly this torrent of abuse poured out. I couldn't believe I was screaming things like 'You f--king w--ker.' I felt a rush of adrenalin and my voice was almost at breaking point. He said some horrible things back and then drove off."

She was mortified for days afterwards, partly because her reaction was so uncharacteristic. "I'd never lost control like that in front of my father, let alone used four-letter words. I remember my dad looking at me afterwards and saying calmly, "Oh dear, Laura." I felt utterly guilty and humiliated - I'm usually so placid. I also felt I'd taken out my anger on someone who really wasn't worth it."

And there's her close friend Kate, from the same village, who ended up in tears after a recent telephone conversation with a man from British Telecom. He refused to delay her disconnection date and within minutes she found herself screaming obscenities down the line. "It got really personal," she says. "I started saying 'Are you such a moron when you're with your wife and family? You've got such a sad, no-life existence." I started crying and he put the phone down on me - looking back I don't blame him one bit."

Roy, 45, who lives by the coast in Cornwall, went through a similar Jekyll and Hyde-style transformation on a local golf course two months ago. While he was negotiating a tricky bunker, his 14-year-old son had, in moment of teenage frustration, kicked his own ball off the green - a gross breach of golfing etiquette. "I'd just missed my shot then I saw this old chap with a handlebar moustache shouting at my son: 'Who the hell are you and what are you doing kicking the green?'

"I went over and said, 'Excuse me, he's my son. How dare you speak to him like that.' A shouting match erupted and I ended up pointing my club at him and screaming like lunatic: 'You stuck up, snotty git - your type are so bloody precious. Why can't you accept there's no harm done and just bugger off?' Everything seemed a bit unreal and I was in bad physical state, sweating and shaking all over. At that point I would have liked to have hit him. Luckily he cooled down before I did and walked off."

Like Laura, Roy is what Grzyb would describe as a "nice" person, someone who finds it quite difficult to lose their temper in normal circumstances: "They're often the people who spend their lives accommodating other's bad behaviour and building up resentment. Then they get to breaking point. It sweeps over them and they don't have to justify it." Dr Kevin Browne, a senior lecturer in clinical criminology at the University of Birmingham, agrees that the sort of rage we see on roads is "anger without consequences". "We call it 're-direction'. Someone who has had a bad day at work and wanted to shout at their boss may be the person who has road rage on the way home."

In this case, as a society we may be no more angry than in previous decades. It's just the rules for expressing aggression are in a state of flux. On one hand, the British are still obsessed with etiquette, manners and rigid codes of conduct. On the other, we are constantly encouraged to assert individuality and acknowledge our emotions.

The fault line occurs in those public places where we're most conditioned to expect civility; queues, golfing greens, even cycling lanes. When "nice" people like Roger, Roy, Kate and Laura don't get that response, they're in danger of displaying the sort of rudeness they most despise in others. Maybe 30 years ago they would just have kept quiet.

Is public anger swelling to unprecedented levels? In the absence of any firm evidence, historians and sociologists refuse to give a categorical answer. Jan Stockdale, a senior social psychology lecturer at the London School of Economics, says: "In the 1950s and 1960s anger was always around but it was much more internalised. Nowadays people don't have such a stiff upper lip. Tolerance levels for most kinds of expression have gone up; it's more acceptable for people to display what they feel. The rules have loosened." With so much "displaced" emotion floating around, this can only be bad news for those on the receiving end. As Roy admits, a little late in the day: "I can still see the look of fear on that man's face when I started waving my club at him. I didn't know I had it in me to frighten somebody so much. For that I feel ashamed."

RAGE AVOIDANCE TACTICS

You need to appear calm and relaxed: someone on the verge of anger needs time to slow the process down.

Don't rise to the bait - one of you has to remain cool.

Back down and try not to engage with them verbally,

If you do, acknowledge the anger and say something like "You're obviously very upset by something I've done".

Try not to ask them too many questions; once someone is in a blind rage they are beyond rationalising and probably can't explain their state.

And if it's you ... Try to relax and slow down - give yourself time to think about what's happening.

Admit you are angry to yourself and to those around you. Don't bottle it up - express your anger rather than act on it.

Step back - try to distance yourself mentally from the situation.

If you feel yourself losing rationality, use humour to defuse your frustration. Sending up your predicament can often help you to be more objective.