It's very interesting when the barking dogs come out.
I first noticed this phenomenon in my own personal life some 28 years ago.
I had met a divorcee — a 36-yr old elementary school teacher — who would inexplicably become angry or defensive seemingly at random, with no discernible pattern to what set off the "barking dogs."
It turned out that she (and two other members of her nuclear family) suffered from Dyslexia, the upshot of which was that almost all of her learning was from direct personal experience, and almost none from reading. (She taught First Grade, so that most of the books she had to deal with in her professional life were books written for 6-yr olds.) Any time I ventured into a discussion of something that could only be known from reading a book, magazine, or newspaper, her barking dogs came out. It had not occurred to me that she had a reading disability because one wall of her living room was an expansive bookcase, filled with books that ranged far beyond any titles I was familiar with. If I would pull some book at random from her bookcase, she would invariably say something like, "Oh, I didn't like that book." It took me a long time to realize that her books were just for show and that she had not read any of them. My own personal collection of books was meager by comparison, but I had read almost every one that I owned. Eventually I realized that whenever I ventured into a subject where she had an undisclosed gap in her knowledge, her emotional state not only swung negative, it swung way negative.
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