Sham rage is behavior such as biting, clawing, hissing, arching the back, and "violent alternating limb movements" produced in animal experiments by removing the cerebral cortex, which are claimed to occur in the absence of any sort of inner experience of rage.[1] These behavioral changes are reversed with small lesions in hypothalamus.[2]
The term sham rage was in use by Walter Bradford Cannon and Sydney William Britton as early as 1925.[3] Cannon and Britton did research on emotional expression resulting from action of subcortical areas. Cats had their neocortices removed but still displayed characteristics of extreme anger resulting from mild stimuli.[4] The concept has been rejected by many affective neuroscientists on the grounds that nonhuman animals displaying rage behaviors do indeed experience rage. This is the view of Jaak Panksepp, for example,[5][6] who was among the first to describe the neural generators of rage.[6][7]
Many still prefer to envision these systems as psychologically vacuous "output" components. The matter was well presented by Walter Hess (1957, p.23), who received the Nobel prize for his work on brain stimulation induced autonomic and behavioral changes in cats from the hypothalamus, including the first descriptions of brain stimulation induced anger responses. In considering such subcortical brain functions, including the rage facilitated by decortication, he noted that "American investigators label this condition sham rage. In our opinion, the behavior that we find manifested here should be interpreted as true rage, and its appearance is aided by the suppression of inhibitions that go out from the cortex" Because of behavioristic anti-mind biases, this reasonable perspective never became a mainstream hypothesis on the Anglo-American scene, and there is little discussion of the varieties of affective states in animals among behavioral neuroscientists to this day.