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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. These behavioral changes are reversed with small lesions in hypothalamus.
The term sham rage was in use by Walter Bradford Cannon and Sydney William Britton as early as 1925. 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. 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, who was among the first to describe the neural generators of rage.