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This podcast covers the fascinating world of psychological science through discussing the research behind popular myths related to psychology, such as the idea that we only use 10% of our brain. Hosted by Dr. Karla Lassonde and Dr. Emily Stark, psychology professors, we discuss misconceptions about psychology and how they have been researched by psychological scientists.
Karla, do you remember those little squishy dolls where you'd squeeze them and then they'd have little, like the little rubber eyes and ears would pop out of their head? Yeah. Yes, think we've all seen these. These are called stress relief dolls and squeezing them, it's supposed to help you vent when you're stressed. And then this gives you a way to let that out so you feel better.
Karla:Right. So you want your eyes to pop out of your head when you're stressed.
Karla:No, you don't. You want someone else's eyes to pop out. I'm actually thinking about, you know, I talk about having kids where they're running around with a lot of energy, and I'm quite sure as a child I heard this go in your room and maybe like beat on the pillow or something soft. Not a stress doll, the 80s we didn't have as many fun things like that, but certainly something to get the energy out.
Emily:Yeah. And unfortunately, this is a misconception. So when you scream into a pillow or when you squeeze the stress doll as hard as you can, you're not actually reducing your anger and you might actually be making it worse. Okay. Today we'll be discussing this myth that venting our anger is a useful or healthy way to make us less angry.
Emily:My name is Emily Stark and I'm a social psychologist.
Karla:And my name is Karla Lassonde and I'm a cognitive psychologist and this is Brains vs Beliefs Debunking Psychological Misconceptions.
Emily:Okay, so, I mean, this does seem like it makes sense. The idea that when we're angry, finding a way to release that emotion in a way that doesn't harm others should be good, right?
Karla:I think so. And it feels good, maybe initially, to get out things that are stuck inside in that way.
Emily:Yeah, we all have that personal experience of just being so mad and feeling like we need to do something. So, yeah, intuitively we might go, Okay, what can I do? That isn't perhaps an unhealthy way of interacting with other people. And so we're trying to be helpful. Trying to reduce aggression in ourselves and other people by perhaps redirecting that, like, screaming into a pillow or hitting the stress doll.
Karla:Yeah. I think it's the way a lot of humans work. Right? We're looking for what tool do we have? And we're not necessarily getting to the root of the problem, which we can talk about later, but we're dealing with the immediate here and now, which is what us were built for to do that.
Emily:Yeah, yeah. We're feeling an emotion, we want to manage it or do something with it in that moment. Correct. So, was looking around just to see how people talk about anger and I found tons of examples of people on the internet promoting this myth, this idea that, oh, we should vent anger or like do something to like release this aggression. One of the things I came across was a podcast called Dope or Nope, which three hosts and this one was focused on products to reduce anger.
Emily:And they had a range of products, but there were definitely ones in there included like a punching bag. So, they had it and they hit the punching bag and this was just presented like without critical discussion as, Oh, here's a valid way to help reduce anger.
Karla:Right. I could see when you think of influencers and you think of podcasts on video, it's really appealing to watch something Right? Like Like, not only are we gonna test out products, which there's a lot of marketing involved, but this has high visual quality to it.
Emily:I found a few more that were less about just showcasing products and more about like trying to actually useful advice. So when I was searching for how to manage anger, I did see a lot of websites that said things like, Okay, throw or break things safely. Yeah. And you use that as a way to express anger. One of the examples of this, and maybe this is something that people have heard of, is the idea of a rage room.
Emily:And these are becoming more popular. And I found a clip promoting a rage room that's actually here in Minnesota where we are based. So, I'll play this and you'll hear them talk about how this gives people an opportunity for catharsis to express anger that it supports mental health. So, to just briefly explain what a rage room is, it has breakable things and it's a safe space to go into with a bat.
Karla:Like old China and porcelain dolls?
Emily:Yes, yes, exactly. And you can break it. Which, I mean, I'm not gonna lie, that does sound fun.
Karla:There is an element of excitement there, isn't there?
Rage Room Promo Clip:There's not that many places out there that you can go somewhere to smash things and not get in trouble for it. That's why places like Wreck It Rage Room are here to give you a healthy outlet to get some of that rage out. Having some sort of physical outlet, and there are mental outlets, and there's therapy, which I know on your side, it's cheaper and way more fun than therapy, but I feel like it is its own kind of therapy for the people that that do want the physical outlet. So I think that there actually is you're probably solving a gap in the market with this beyond just it's fun to smash
Rage Room Promo Clip:cathartic and so helpful to be able to express such a physical emotion. Your rage, I mean, our entire bodies show the rage. Our faces, our muscles, the way we stand. To be able to physically let that out in a safe controlled environment is huge. I'm so incredibly grateful that we get to help the amount of people that we do get to help.
Emily:So, you hear them talk about this as therapy. Right. This is being promoted as this supports your mental health. And this myth or misconception is fairly pervasive. A study of undergrad students, and this was done back in 1983, found sixty six percent of them believed that expressing anger is a good way of reducing your risk for being aggressive.
Emily:So people are hearing and believing this type of messaging.
Karla:Yeah, and in my own research, Emily, we looked at this particular misconception. I'd have to go back and be very specific about what proportion of our students agreed with it. But I do know we only looked at those that were above fifty percent. So even though we've got this break from 1983 to present day, it is still like the rage room tells us. People understand this.
Karla:They believe that it's a viable choice that we should be getting out our anger in these ways.
Emily:Wow. It just continues. So then we wonder where does this idea come from if it's so almost universally believed and
Karla:It must be been around for a long time, Emily.
Emily:Actually, yes, it goes back to the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, who wrote about the idea of catharsis. This is now over two thousand years ago. So, here we're using catharsis as a term to mean, let's release negative emotions. And Aristotle was writing about this in a discussion of the role of tragic plays. Why would we watch these sad tragedies?
Emily:And the idea is that this could help to release negative feelings like anger and sadness.
Karla:They had to get people to come to the place two thousand years ago. Like, they don't have a commercial like The Rage Room, but it's insinuating this idea where this is a human element that people have these feelings and then they can watch these feelings and it should be it evolves us in some way.
Emily:Yes. Yes. And this idea stuck around. In the early nineteen hundreds, Sigmund Freud really dug into this idea of catharsis and specifically tied it to being useful for releasing anger. And for Freud, he thought that otherwise if we don't find a way to successfully release our negative emotions, they'll build up and then that leads to psychological conditions like hysteria or neurosis, some of the things that Freud was particularly interested in, or sudden and severe aggression.
Emily:So, Freud even more closely tied this idea of catharsis to mental health, that this helps us release our negative emotions in a healthy manner. And if we don't do that, then it could be a problem.
Karla:Yeah. Our audience probably is used to hearing Freud in the context of early types of therapy called psychotherapy. And it's good to always bring up the value and then what has happened since then with Freud. And so we're not necessarily attaching Freud to this misconception in particular, but these were some early ideas that Freud had as well. And again, might be manifesting into where we might all know Freud talking about dreams and and ways that we eventually might deal with anger and sadness and so on.
Emily:Yeah. Exactly. Freud was interested in what are all these subtle ways we can understand other people and later in his life, especially when he got more interested in some of the more extreme negative emotions and then he brought in this to add this idea of catharsis that like, yeah, these sneak out maybe in our dreams and our interactions with others if we don't release them. Got it. And, I mean, really, is the Hulk.
Emily:This is this classic Marvel comic book character, right? When mild mannered Bruce Banner gets too angry, he changes into his violent alter ego called the Hulk. And this suggests that when we store anger and let it build up, that it will create a problem. That it's like steam in a boiler that needs to be released or an explosion will occur.
Karla:Yeah, we have other characters like Doctor. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where in order to understand that we as humans have a range of the way we can expose ourselves and the way we can feel, it it does make sense that we would manifest it not only outwardly but into these fictional types of characters. I like that.
Emily:Yeah. Yeah. I also found some people, and this might be considered more of fringe types of therapies, who have really specifically taken this idea of catharsis as a way to manage negative feelings as a specific type of therapy that's been promoted as primal therapy or primal scream therapy are some of the terms used. And this specific approach was developed in the 1960s. It encourages patients to release childhood trauma by re experiencing childhood pain and then screaming or crying to help release that pain.
Emily:However, controlled studies, both that were done at the time of creating this therapy and since, have not successfully found that this is positive results. Most psychologists consider primal therapy to be discredited but I still found mention of it on the internet when I was digging around looking at how people talk about anger.
Karla:Yeah. I can imagine some movies that are psychological thrillers where the main character goes out and screams into the backyard or Mhmm. In the car when nobody is listening. And there's this idea that that's gonna reset us. But you can see where if I'm screaming all day long, Emily, which has never happened, by the way Tempting.
Karla:I imagine there's other physiological things that are raised, like heart rate, breath rate, maybe even blood pressure. And that doesn't seem so good, right? Very good point.
Emily:Okay, so we've been talking about this as a misconception. How do we know? How can we test how catharsis or venting is actually influencing our levels of anger? And Brad Bushman is a psychologist who has done a lot of research into anger and the influence of expressing anger. And he has developed some really interesting experiments.
Emily:And to study this in a lab experiment, you have to deal with angry people, which is always interesting.
Karla:How are you gonna find angry people?
Emily:So, here's what Bushman does. So, think about how you would feel. So, one of his protocols that he does to create anger in a lab is he has participants write essays and then they get their essay back with very critical comments. Uh-oh. Yep, like someone else just tore this essay apart and that's a way to experimentally create a feeling of anger.
Karla:You think Brad Bushman did this in his classroom before the research.
Emily:Right? I know. Any professor is like, oh, I create anger all the time. Yeah.
Karla:I mean, it it it can come from a good place. And but mostly we react a little bit. We're hurt quite a bit when we have our writing.
Emily:Exactly. Yes. And as a teacher, I'm trying to support my students. So in this study, like these were extremely negative Like,
Karla:you're a horrible writer or we can only imagine.
Emily:Exactly, yes. And I should say that at the end of studies like these, participants are always debriefed, meaning that everything is explained to them. In this case, they would be told, Okay, the comments are fake, they're only designed to upset them. So, the goal here as ethical researchers is we don't want to let participants leave the study angry. But we can manipulate this feeling of anger so that we can study it.
Karla:Yeah, and I don't know what our listeners think, but inducing anger via writing, is a fairly mild way to induce anger. And Yes. To point out that in the laboratory, we often we're trying to replicate what happens in the real world, And we can kind of give a nod to say that most of our anger would be over abundant in comparison, but it's something where people aren't gonna leave and then they have to do a lot of due diligence to get people feeling better again.
Emily:Exactly. Yes. So, in Bushman's studies, he makes participants angry and then some are offered a punching bag to hit to help vent their anger, or others are given a distracting story to read. And then he's measuring their aggression both before and after this punching bag and story. And we can measure it in a few different ways.
Emily:We can do self report and just ask people. We can look at physiological measures like heart rate. We can look at cortisol, which is a stress hormone that can tie to maybe like aggression or like a readiness to aggress. And what he continually finds is who becomes less aggressive, it's the people who read the distracting story and not the people who hit the punching bag.
Karla:I see. You might remember another punching bag experiment, one that we teach in an intro psychology and I think is would be fairly well known if we had to pick out psychological studies. There was this Bobo doll study and Bobo was a doll that's similar to a clown punching bag that kind of rolls around. And in this particular case in the 60s, a researcher by the name of Albert Bandura was interested in observational learning, in particular among little children, probably five, six, seven years And they had an adult go into the room and take this punching bag, punch it, and do all kinds of things that emulated aggression. And then they brought the kids in.
Karla:Then kids are standing around. And lo and behold, the kids will socialize to do what the adults did. So this is something psychological maybe to we have all these punching bag experiments. But they weren't really testing, anger or aggression, more of mimicking how do we, portray aggression when we see aggression.
Emily:It absolutely ties in though because another area of research that Doctor. Bushman has contributed to is video games and aggression. And a lot of people talk about violent video games as, Oh, here's another, like a healthy way to release anger or to release aggression because you're not actually hurting anyone. And what that Bobo Doll study suggests is that watching so those kids who watch the adult play aggressively with a Bobo doll, like you said, were more likely to then be aggressive later on with toys. And so it suggests that just watching aggression can lead to aggressive actions.
Emily:And in the same way research with video games has shown that playing violent and aggressive video games can lead to more feelings of anger and more aggression and behaviors right after playing that game. Now I want to point out that studies don't show super long term effects. It's not like violent video games are the cause of all aggression. But Bushman is one of the people who is saying these are not healthy ways for people to express negative emotion.
Karla:I see. When we see aggression, we probably, behaviorally, we're going to be more aggressive. And that's important because sometimes it can be a little bit cause and effect. Right? If I have a lot of things going on in my life and I see aggression plus, emotionally and psychologically I have reason to feel like anger, then it's this, like, two different catalyst towards anger.
Karla:But it it can also be where I'm demonstrating, like, I'm actually doing the anger. And I think that's where it becomes nuanced, as you said, Emily, with video games, emotion, and that sort of regulation.
Emily:Yeah. Yeah. Bushman describes this, and especially venting anger, like if we're doing something when we're already anger angry. As this is like throwing fuel on a fire. We might think we feel better after expressing our anger, but it can actually be toxic and make us more upset.
Emily:Venting will increase that physiological arousal, increase that heart rate, increase blood pressure, and then that feeds back into our experience of emotion. So, heart is racing and you think, Oh, I'm still angry. I'm just still so mad. Well, actually that experience of venting is continuing that negative emotion. It's not releasing it.
Emily:And if we are experiencing that, then that can lead us to lash out at other people or respond more aggressively to whatever initially made us angry. Can We think about road rage incidents as another example where they can be escalated because people are still in that physical experience of being angry and they're feeling that in their bodies and then it does get released in negative ways.
Karla:Yes. Not only does it become something that you feel very much so out of your your person, but then it becomes a learned response. This is how we we then need to act out aggressively aggressively when we, anytime we might experience these sorts of emotions.
Emily:Yes, it becomes a pattern that can be really difficult to break out from. Now, I've shown some internet examples of this misconception being promoted but there is also lots of good information being pushed. So, here's just a quick clip from newsy.com that also and they're specifically talking about like these ideas of rage rooms, that they actually don't help us reduce our anger.
Scripps News Debunk:But mental health experts aren't sold on whether these rooms really help with stress. In fact, in some cases, they might just reinforce aggression.
Scripps News Debunk Clip:There are two facets of it. One being that the breaking things, it's not really solving the problem. You know, again, it maybe provides a temporary release, but it's really not doing anything to address the key issue that's causing the anger. You're So just leaving a key issue unresolved. And then there's the second piece, which is just that sort of emotions tend to often feed off of each other.
Scripps News Debunk Clip:So if you're doing something that's very aggressive and destructive, you know, feelings are likely to persist.
Emily:So again, pointing out the same thing, that as much as it may seem like it feels good to just break stuff, It is, it increases arousal and it doesn't actually, it's not reducing that angry feeling in the first place.
Karla:Now if you want to go break stuff though,
Scripps News Debunk Clip:could. Yeah, you can.
Emily:But let's stop calling these therapy. Think would be would be Yeah. One thing we could
Karla:do. Yeah. Yeah. And I think we do that. We mental health is something that's so important.
Karla:We wanna talk about it outside of maybe therapy, but we do have to rein it back in and say, like, what is this really? Well, there's some consequences to using it as a therapeutic tool.
Emily:Yeah, yeah. And it does speak to the importance of science that we can't always trust our own the things that we the way we think things affect us, we're not always accurate in that. We might think we feel better, but we might not actually be better.
Karla:Yeah, psychology is not always common sense. Yes, If many times it's not. Have to test this.
Emily:And I just also want to note that beyond mental health, there are lots of physical health consequences to high levels of anger. So, studies show that brief outbursts of anger, they put stress on our blood vessels, it increases the risk for heart attack and stroke. Lot of research into heart disease finds that people who are chronically angry are showing higher levels of heart disease and they recover more slowly after maybe surgery or after experiencing a heart attack. So, this has consequences for our own wellness we the need to learn how to manage our anger effectively.
Karla:Got it. If we've learned that response, not only is it incorrect, it's not going to lead to what we think it will lead to, it's not therapeutic, but it also has these kind of comorbid problems that come along with it.
Emily:Yeah. So what should we do instead when we feel angry? And research suggests a few different approaches and techniques that are related to managing stress can be really helpful. So, slow breathing or being mindful of your mental and physical reactions or also distraction, like in that Bushman study where people just read a story to distract them from their anger over the negative essay comments. These can be healthier ways to help you to manage anger and they can actually be effective.
Emily:It's really about reducing that physiological arousal that's going to help you reduce anger.
Karla:Got it. Let's talk about the key takeaways, Emily. I think you've done a really great job talking about what is it that we should do when we're angry. And we know point blank that the misconception is when we're angry, we should be angrier, and we should punch things, we should hit things. But in reality, not only is this a bad idea, because of some of the physiological or scientific reasons, there's enough research to say it actually doesn't work.
Emily:Exactly! Thank you, Karla. Yes, when we are angry, the healthy and best way to manage that is to think about lowering the physiological arousal. So, don't work yourself up more by hitting a punching bag or playing a super violent video game or like going to a rage room. That's not going to reduce your anger.
Emily:Instead, think about deep breathing, distraction, what can you do to calm yourself? This will help you feel less angry in that moment and it will reduce the chance of those negative health outcomes I mentioned, like high blood pressure or heart attacks. And we talk about how this can become a pattern. You can build these positive patterns that can help you better manage your anger or rage in the future. Because unfortunately, we're gonna get angry.
Emily:Wish we could but fix it's about how do we manage it effectively when it does happen.
Karla:Okay, very good.
Emily:Another point I want to make here is that it's good to remember that self help books can be wrong. I think because people talk about venting anger as like therapy that this comes up a lot in this mental health self help y world. And this misconception is spread as truth and sometimes by people who are very well meaning, they just want to help. But, if you're not familiar with the science of psychology and the importance of actually doing research to test these assumptions, you can spread misinformation. And sometimes many people who write self help books, they're just trying to make money.
Emily:Because if it sounds interesting, it will sell. It doesn't need to be scientifically supported to publish a book.
Karla:Absolutely.
Emily:Remember, just because you've heard something over and over, it doesn't automatically make it true. And this is also why science is interesting and exciting. We can believe something and then we test it and then maybe we need to update or change our beliefs. That is okay. And that's part of what it means to be human and to be a scientist and to understand our own behaviors.
Emily:We don't always have insight into that. We have to think about what did the scientists say?
Karla:Yeah, that's what drew us to our jobs in the field.
Emily:Exactly. So remember when you're feeling angry, don't go punch a wall, don't go to a rage room. Think about reducing that physiological arousal. You heard it here on Brains versus Beliefs.
Karla:You can learn more about this podcast on our website called communicatingpsychologicalscience.com. You'll find references and a link to the episode. Feel free to contact us on our website with any comments or ideas for future episodes. And follow Brains versus Beliefs wherever you find podcasts. Thanks for listening.