Nowadays I'm back in university, studying psychology (I just started).
As far as I know, the problem with anger management is not the anger itself, it's how you deal with it so it doesn't overwhelm you, and so you can have less of it. What I mean is that it's a symptom, not the issue itself. It's normal to be angry when someone is a jerk to you, it's healthy even, and so it's not* inherently "bad" (as we so often portray anger and sadness). The problem is when you let it get away from you.
I hope I understand correctly that your last paragraph is agreeing with my comment. If not, then I should have extended the notion of "necessary" to "useful", in the sense that you are describing. However the problem with evo psych is that it's largely non-falsifiable. The part you are describing is somewhat an obligatory aspect of evolution, but evo psychologists and anthropologists tend to draw conclusions that aren't rigorous (in my opinion). This is coming from someone who has 30 credits in Anthropology from a few years back :)
Generally there is no harm in theorizing, but I consider psychology and psychotherapy to be too important to allow ourselves to consider untested information. I do agree that other people may find Dr Eckman interesting... I don't but others might ;)
>Generally there is no harm in theorizing, but I consider psychology and psychotherapy to be too important to allow ourselves to consider untested information.
Psychology and psychotherapy are almost wholly theoretical, subjective, soft sciences, rather than objectively testable hard sciences like physics and biology.
>psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests".[1][2]
As far as I know, the problem with anger management is not the anger itself, it's how you deal with it so it doesn't overwhelm you, and so you can have less of it. What I mean is that it's a symptom, not the issue itself. It's normal to be angry when someone is a jerk to you, it's healthy even, and so it's not* inherently "bad" (as we so often portray anger and sadness). The problem is when you let it get away from you.
I hope I understand correctly that your last paragraph is agreeing with my comment. If not, then I should have extended the notion of "necessary" to "useful", in the sense that you are describing. However the problem with evo psych is that it's largely non-falsifiable. The part you are describing is somewhat an obligatory aspect of evolution, but evo psychologists and anthropologists tend to draw conclusions that aren't rigorous (in my opinion). This is coming from someone who has 30 credits in Anthropology from a few years back :)
Generally there is no harm in theorizing, but I consider psychology and psychotherapy to be too important to allow ourselves to consider untested information. I do agree that other people may find Dr Eckman interesting... I don't but others might ;)