Anger is an aggressive, urgent emotion felt in reaction to an offense or injury.
Angst, as used by speakers of English, is a feeling of intense but generalized apprehension. Unlike anxiety, English angst has a philosophical tone to it, with the implication of reaction to the fundamentally pervasive problems of existence. Angst triggers troubled ruminations.
Anxiety is an emotion of deep concern that is manifested through on-edge feelings or actions. Unlike angst, anxiety triggers unbalanced actions that are often out-of-proportion in relation to their cause.
Anguish is a kind of desperate emotional pain, of the sort of tone that would accompany especially distressing physical pain, even if no physical distress has actually taken place.
It’s easy to see that these emotions all have some common features. They are all feelings of urgent reaction, involving a sense of being unsettled and concerned. This similarity is due to a common ancestry. All of these emotions are the offspring of the original ProtoIndoEuropean root word angh, which referred to the sensation of tight, painful constriction. Another linguistic descendant of angh is angina, the medical condition in which heart muscle contracts painfully, interfering with the normal flow of blood to such an extent that it threatens the life of the person suffering from it.
In the 1970s, social psychiatrist Julian Leff explained, “We find that emotions we consider as distinct, namely, anger, fear (anxiety) and sadness, at one stage in the development of English were all represented by words which derived from the same hypothetical Indo-Germanic root Angh” .
Reflecting upon Leff’s observation of the evolution of the meaning of angh‘s linguistic offspring, psychologist James A. Russell wrote that, “Such experience was initially undifferentiated, and hence the single word was broad in meaning. Later this root word split into a number of variants to differentiate distinct psychological experiences… Languages differ today by including more or fewer distinctions among emotional states.”
An implication of Russell’s comment is that emotion words don’t refer to static, unchanging feelings that can be neatly defined and operationalized for objective measurement. The words we use to refer to emotions are fluid, changing their meaning over time, often dividing into related, but distinct concepts of subjective sensation.
As Lisa Feldman Barrett has pointed out, when we articulate new words for distinct emotions, we craft new conceptual spaces for subjective feelings that become possible for individuals because they are culturally shared with others. Cultivating emotional granularity doesn’t just allow us to become more precisely descriptive of feelings that already exist. It also allows us to experience our emotional lives in new ways.
We can’t say that anger and anxiety are really just the same thing because they are derived from the same linguistic ancestry, any more than we can say that two brothers are identical because they share the same parents. It’s not even accurate to say that the way that English speakers use the word angst is an incorrect misunderstanding of the German word angst. Words mean what people feel that they mean, and that changes over time and across cultural contexts.
There is a feeling of tightness in anxiety, anguish, angst, and anger, but the form of that tightness shifts from word to word in ways that are as telling as the differences between dull pain, sharp pain, throbbing pain, and nagging pain. Just as physicians know the importance of asking patients to describe the way that they hurt, those of us who seek to understand the cosmos of emotion must not be content to accept the vague generalizations offered by frameworks of basic emotion.
