The belief that “venting” anger has a beneficial cathartic effect has become widely accepted in the modern world. Belief in the value of venting has manifested in the online world in the form of “rant” sites (e.g. Rant Rampage) where people not only get to freely express their vitriol, they can also read and comment on rants left by other venters. However, decades of research have shown that venting, far from releasing anger, actually makes it worse. Not surprisingly, a recent study has shown that online ranting seems to increase anger and is associated with anger-related problems. Ranting may be problematic because it strengthens the belief that anger needs to be expressed aggressively. On the other hand, expressing anger in a constructive and non-aggressive way can actually be beneficial.
Image credit: "Rage" by pypher courtesy of DeviantArt
Who uses rant sites and how they handle anger
A recent paper (Martin, Coyier, VanSistine, & Schroeder, 2013) sheds some light on the people who use rant sites
and the effects of ranting and writing rants. A survey of users of a number of
popular rant sites found that users scored unusually high on trait anger (how
anger-prone one is in general) and experienced many negative consequences
related to anger, such as verbal and physical fights, damaged relationships,
property damage, and dangerous driving. Nearly half reported that someone had
told them they had an anger problem, and over a third admitted that this was
true.
It may well be that people who are predisposed to be very
angry are attracted to these kinds of sites. Martin et al. performed an
experiment to test the emotional impact of using rant sites. They found that
reading another person’s rants online for five minutes had a negative effect on
mood. Additionally, they asked participants to spend five minutes writing a
rant of their own. As expected, after ranting, participants felt decreased
happiness and increased anger.
People who like to rant get into more fights than most people. Image credit: SEMC courtesy of DeviantArt
The ineffectiveness of catharsis
These findings about ranting accord with previous research showing that supposedly “venting” anger through such actions as hitting
pillows or whatever actually increase anger levels, and, more troubling,
increase subsequent aggressive behavior as well (Bushman, 2002). For
example, one study (Bushman, 2002) found that doing nothing at all for two
minutes was actually effective in reducing anger, whereas punching a sand bag
for as long as one wanted while thinking of an offending person increased anger
towards that person. Furthermore, when given an opportunity to punish another
person in a game by blasting them with noise[1],
people who had previously “vented” their fury on a punching bag were more
aggressive (gave louder and longer blasts) than those who had done nothing to
vent their anger. (A more detailed description of this study can be found here.) What this
shows is that venting is actually a terrible anger management strategy.
In spite of the fact that venting is likely to backfire in
the long run, belief in its value is widespread and even encouraged. Popular
self-help books promote venting, and there was even once a billboard in
Missouri that said: “Hit a Pillow, Hit a Wall, But Don’t Hit Your Kids!”
Hitting a pillow is obviously preferable to hitting one’s kids, but ironically
such advice may actually increase the likelihood of real violence rather than
preventing it.
So why do people believe in it and why does it not work?
Venting reflects a “pressure cooker” model of anger. That is, people think of
anger as something that builds up in side of one until one is ready to explode.
Venting is supposed to be like blowing off steam to reduce the pressure inside
until it is more manageable. This metaphor seems intuitively appealing to many
people and even was endorsed by Sigmund Freud who promoted the idea that
cathartic expressions of emotion were beneficial to mental health because they
released pent up “psychic energy” that if not discharged would manifest in
neurotic symptoms.
However, the fact that venting actually increases rather
than reduces anger indicates that Freud’s cathartic model is misguided. A more
modern theory of anger, the cognitive neoassociation model, proposes that
people associate violent, aggressive actions with angry thoughts (Bushman, 2002). Thus, aggressively styled
behaviour, such as hitting things, or ranting (basically saying nasty things
about someone and wishing them ill) maintain a person’s attention on angry
thoughts, rather than dissipating the anger. Venting and ranting effectively
keep angry feelings in memory and increase rumination about the offending
event.
Badly managed anger can have dark consequences indeed. Image credit: DominiqueWesson courtesy of DeviantArt
Anger need not be destructive
Venting may increase the likelihood of subsequent aggressive
behaviour perhaps because the idea of venting is based on the idea that anger
is essentially destructive. That is, people link anger with wanting to hurt
others, and therefore think that these hurtful impulses can best be dissipated
through symbolic acts of aggression. Venting and ranting may therefore
strengthen the association between anger and aggression. However, although it
is true that when people are angry they may want to hurt others, anger does not
have to be expressed through aggression. (Indeed, aggression can occur in the
absence of any anger.) Many people learn how to express their anger in
constructive ways. Doing so can sometimes help resolve the problem that
provoked the anger in the first place (which is unlikely to occur through
venting). Additionally, expressing anger constructively has been found to have
a number of benefits for mental and physical health, such as reduced blood
pressure (Graham, Lobel, Glass, & Lokshina,
2008).
Beneficial effects of expressive writing about anger
A constructive alternative to ranting may be focused
expressive writing, which involves exploring one’s deepest thoughts and
feelings about an issue in writing (Graham, et
al., 2008). Superficially, writing a rant might seem similar to
expressive writing but there are subtle and important differences. Ranting
seems to mainly involve describing all the things you don’t like about someone,
e.g. how they are a worthless, good-for-nothing who has done you wrong, and
generally trying to compress as much malevolence as possible into one’s words.
Ranting as such seems like an unreflective process without a clear goal.
Expressive writing tasks on the other hand, encourage a person to try to
understand the causes of their feelings and thereby gain some insight that may
lead to a resolution of the problem.
One study found that expressing anger constructively through
writing had a beneficial effect on mental health (Graham, et al., 2008). Participants in this study all suffered
from chronic pain
and were asked to write a letter on two occasions expressing their anger about
their situation.[2] To
ensure that participants did not simply write pointless rants, they were given
clear instructions that directed them to describe their anger feelings clearly,
specifying what they were angry about; explain their angry reaction instead of
just venting; and to state what they wished to be done to help them feel less
angry. These instructions were intended to help the writers get a clearer
understanding of their feelings about their situation and what they wanted to
do about it. Examination of the contents of the letters showed that most
participants were able to express their anger without nastiness or bitterness.
Compared to a control group, participants who had written these letters
reported less depression and greater feelings of control over their pain at
subsequent follow up assessments (four weeks and then nine weeks after
writing).
What this study suggests to me is that expressing anger in a
thoughtful constructive way without aggressive intentions can be helpful in
creating a sense of greater control over one’s emotional life. I suspect that
ranting on the other hand creates a sense of permission for one to lose control
of one’s emotions that may leak over into other aspects of one’s life
potentially causing all sorts of problems. That is, ranting may be an
indulgence that weakens one’s ability to cope effectively with one’s emotions.
In summary, doing nothing at all is a more effective way of dealing with anger,
rather than hitting a pillow, or posting rants on the internet. Perhaps better
yet though would be to learn to use one’s anger constructively rather than
mindlessly trying to blow it off as if one was a human pressure cooker.
Notes
[1] Participants in this study were actually playing against a computer, so their blasts were not heard by a real person, but they did not know this at the time.
[2] They were not expected to actually post these letters to anyone.
© Scott McGreal. Please do not reproduce without
permission. Brief excerpts may be quoted as long as a link to the original
article is provided.
This article also appears on Psychology Today on
my blog Unique - Like Everybody Else.
Another blog post about anger and how NOT to deal with it
References
Bushman, B. J. (2002). Does Venting Anger Feed or
Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive
Responding. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, 28(6), 724-731. doi: 10.1177/0146167202289002
Graham, J., Lobel, M., Glass, P., & Lokshina, I.
(2008). Effects of written anger expression in chronic pain patients: making
meaning from pain. Journal of Behavioral
Medicine, 31(3), 201-212. doi: 10.1007/s10865-008-9149-4
Martin, R. C., Coyier, K. R., VanSistine, L. M., & Schroeder, K. L. (2013). Anger on the Internet: The Perceived Value of Rant-Sites Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 16 (2) DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2012.0130
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