Well, Sunday night at the Oscars certainly threw out some unexpected drama! If you didn't catch it, Will Smith slapped the awards presenter Chris Rock in the face on stage. This was in response to a joke Rock made about Jada Pinkett-Smith's the actor's wife shaved head, which is actually a result of the hair-loss condition alopecia. It has set off a frenzy of comment and judgement - both in support of and against Will Smith's action.

Will Smith has since gone on to try and make amends by apologising in a statement posted on Instagram, saying: 'Violence in all of its forms is poisonous and destructive... My behaviour at last night's Academy Awards was unacceptable and inexcusable. Jokes at my expense are a part of the job, but a joke about Jada's medical condition was too much for me to bear and I reacted emotionally.'

I have been reading some of the comment and judgement of Smith's behaviour and noticing that it seems quite polarised - in simplistic terms 'for' or 'against' it. In my experience this is not an uncommon reaction to such behaviour, which is after all a form of anger expressed through physical violence in this incident.

How we respond to our own angry feelings

Anger typically goes alongside the familiar survival response of 'fight' that we feel when under actual or perceived threat along with 'flight' and 'freeze' . What can happen when we experience this survival response is that the part of our brain that handles judgement the pre-frontal cortex goes 'offline', and in the process reduces or takes away our capacity to think straight, reflect or problem solve.

Hence, we react without thinking, rather than respond with our thinking. Will Smith's behaviour at the Oscars illustrates a clear example of this kind of 'reacting without thinking' which he acknowledges in his apology: 'I reacted emotionally'. Once he was away from the heat of the moment and had time to calm down and allow his pre-frontal cortex to come back 'online' he was able to reflect on his behaviour. His apology is then part of the process of repairing the hurt has action caused though it took several days for him to apologise to Rock.

How we respond to the anger of another person

This survival response is also typically activated to a greater or lesser extent in those who are either on the receiving end of someone's anger, or those who witness it. In response to being slapped, Chris Rock froze momentarily, before recovering his composure remarkably quickly. Likewise, apparently everyone fell silent in the press room - another manifestation of the freeze response. I am left wondering if this vicarious threat response activation is, in part at least, fuelling some of the polarised commentary on the incident.

What really interests me in response to this incident is how can we use it collectively as a catalyst to open up the conversation about anger. As someone who runs workshops to help people better understand and regulate their anger, I am meeting people who actually feel quite desperate - they are confused, guilty, shamed and have no idea what to do with 'the beast within' that makes their life difficult on daily basis.

Anger continues to be misunderstood and perceived as difficult, problematic or just plain or bad. This makes it hard to talk about and even harder for those who really struggle to regulate this emotion to deal with it. Yet the reality is that anger is just one of our many emotions and a normal part of our human experience. I describe anger as:

• An emotion designed to alert us to something that needs our attention or that something we value is threatened in some way
• An 'end' emotion which arises to protect us from other underlying uncomfortable feelings of vulnerability such as shame, embarrassment, humiliation, guilt, jealousy or grief