Interesting 2002 essay on rage that cites Raine's work, among others, and mentions SSRI's as a treatment that seems to help impulsive rage:

Beyond Anger: Studying the Subconscious Nature of Rage
By Richard A. Friedman, M.D., International Herald Tribune, November 12, 2002

At 38, my patient Michael had reached the top of his profession but was having a lot of trouble getting along with his colleagues. They were, he revealed, afraid of his angry outbursts, which could be provoked by the faintest of criticism from them.

Then in one session I got a taste of his rage myself. Feeling that I had been critical of his treatment of a subordinate at work, his usually pleasant manner abruptly changed. Glowering, he clenched his teeth and began to crush a Diet Coke can with his hands before letting lose a stream of expletives. He was having a rage attack.

Michael is hardly alone with his problem. The most famous rage attack of all time was staged by Achilles, who threatened to sit out the Trojan War over a woman, but relented only after his fellow Greeks soothed his wounded vanity.

Most people know the far less exalted rage of people like Mike Tyson, who bit off part of Evander Holyfield's ear during a boxing match.

The popular notion is that rage is an undesirable but completely controllable emotion. As with drug abuse, the theory goes, one can just say no to it; take an anger management course and get a grip.

But what many people don't realize is that the human brain comes hard-wired for anger and rage. There is strong recent evidence from neuroscience that people share this ancient emotional neural circuitry with all kinds of animals.

For example, one can experimentally induce rage in animals by selectively stimulating the amygdala, which is part of the limbic system, the center of the brain's emotional network. In humans, destruction of the amygdala leads to a state of docility and hypersexuality called the Kluver-Bucy syndrome.

An intriguing clue to how the brain may process rage comes from a recent brain imaging study of convicted murderers. Using a PET scan, which measures glucose metabolism in neurons, Dr. Adrian Raine at the University of Southern California, compared a group of impulsive murderers with premeditative murderers.

In this preliminary study, yet to be replicated, he found that impulsive murderers had significantly lower activity in the prefrontal cortex than premeditative murderers.

Those who committed planned murder had equivalent prefrontal cortical activity to the normal subjects in a control group.

The prefrontal cortex, a brain region just behind the eyes, serves an executive function, integrating information and inhibiting emotional impulses that arise from deeper brain centers like the limbic system. So it may be that violent impulsive murderers are less able to resist their own impulses. Cold-blooded killers, in contrast, are as able as other people to control their violent impulses; they just choose not to.

After a few minutes, Michael's rage evaporated. Then he was able to explain that he had been suddenly overtaken with an irresistible and violent fury. And this all happened before he was even aware of the reason for his rage.

Michael's experience disproves the common assumption that we have to understand something consciously before we can have feelings about it.

In fact, Dr. Joseph LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience at New York University has shown that emotions can be rapidly processed by limbic brain networks that operate outside consciousness.

The problem in understanding rage is that it represents a final path of many causes. Like body temperature, rage can be a normal response to certain environmental stimuli or a sign of serious underlying disease.

In Michael's case, the rage is characteristic of his narcissistic personality. Acutely aware of how others perceive him, he is always scanning the world for insults and is quick to anger. For him, rage follows anything that threatens his shaky self-esteem.

Then there are people who experience anger attacks as a symptom of major depression. For example, Dr. Maurizio Fava of Harvard Medical School has reported that up to 40 percent of depressed patients experience anger attacks, which subside in about 70 percent of the subjects who are successfully treated.

Others experience rage attacks after suffering traumatic brain injuries. This was first demonstrated more than a century ago by the famous case of Phineas Gage, the railway worker who had an iron rod shoot through his skull in a freak accident. He was transformed from a gentleman to an aggressive social lout as a direct result of extensive damage to his prefrontal cortex.

What is interesting is that impulsive aggressive behavior is also tightly linked to the neurotransmitter serotonin. Researchers have found that some violent and impulsive patients have significantly lower levels of brain serotonin compared with normal people in control groups. That is probably why serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac and Zoloft, which enhance serotonin function, have an anti-aggressive effect and are useful in treating violent criminals as well as patients prone to rage who also suffer from ailments like depression or personality disorders.

But just because our brains may be hard-wired for basic emotions like rage, does this mean that we have little or no control over them?

In a word, no. With the small exception of those people with actual brain injury who literally lack the requisite neural hardware to control their emotional impulses, the rest of us can be expected to weather the storm of our emotions without acting on them. Most of us, like those who commit premeditated murder, have an intact prefrontal cortex and so cannot claim that we are at the mercy of an of irresistible impulse.

But it also means that a simplistic model of rage is no longer possible. Yes, an anger management class makes sense for someone like Michael, but for a Phineas Gage, it would be as useful as just saying no to a rampaging elephant.