Why Venting Doesn’t Help You Deal With Anger | Jennifer Parlamis  ## Metadata - Author: [[TED Talks Daily]] - Full Title: Why Venting Doesn’t Help You Deal With Anger | Jennifer Parlamis - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/fc84aaa6-97f2-46b3-bc70-65cde1ec8be2 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Stroller Story Reveals Misattribution** - Jennifer Parlamis describes noticing her husband push their daughter's stroller with one hand and becoming angry. - A conversation with her father revealed a situational cause she had not considered and defused her anger. Transcript: Jennifer Parlamis So I'd like to begin with a story. When my daughter was a baby, we lived in New York City, and I was there studying to get a PhD in social and organizational psychology, and I was researching conflict resolution and negotiation. And like most New Yorkers, we would walk everywhere, and I would push her in a stroller with two hands, like a responsible parent, all over the city. But I noticed that my husband, he pushed the stroller quite differently, with one hand kind of off to the side, and kind of looking a little bit too cool, like he had better places to be. And this really bothered me. I started to get angry. And I started to make all these causal attributions, what psychologists call these explanations for his behavior. One, I thought maybe, oh, he's a hotshot Wall Street lawyer now. He thinks he's too good to push a stroller. Or I thought, maybe he thinks women are the only ones who should push strollers. Or maybe he didn't care about safety. And that was why he was doing it that way. So as I was thinking about all these explanations for his behavior, I started to get angry. And that anger started to build up, and I vented. I expressed my anger forcefully to anybody who would listen. Called my friends, called my sister. But that venting didn't help release my anger. I actually felt even angrier. Until one day, I saw my dad pushing the stroller the exact same way. He came into the city, and he was taking my daughter to the park, and he's walking like that. And I know my dad doesn't care about looking cool. Sorry, Dad. And I said, I know I must be missing something here. What don't I know about this situation? So I asked him a simple question. I said, Dad, why are you pushing the stroller like this? And he said, oh, well, because when I use two hands, my stride is too long, and I kick the bottom of the stroller. And it hurts. It actually cuts into my shins. He's like, so I much prefer it, but that's why I do it. And so what I realized at the time I was learning all about this cognitive bias, but I made the fundamental attribution error. ([Time 0:02:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0167a4e9-0261-442e-ab85-c0f2f1443f55)) - **Anger Is Built By Attributions** - Anger is constructed by our brain through causal explanations we assign to events. - Those attributions create a self-reinforcing cycle where blame increases anger and anger increases blame. Transcript: Jennifer Parlamis So at that moment, I started to get really curious about venting because I thought that was helping me in some way. But so as a researcher and getting my PhD, I started to look into venting a little bit more. And I found out that actually venting doesn't release anger. And many years of research showed that. And I thought, well, this is really important because we have anger all around us all the time. If you think about road rage or trolls on the internet or divisive politics or wars, anger is everywhere. And maybe we're not really knowing how we should manage that. So my research early in my career asked that some really critical questions I thought. One is if venting doesn't work, why not? And if venting doesn't work, why do we keep doing it? Okay, so hold on to those questions for a minute, because I want to back up and talk a little bit about anger first. So, cognitive appraisal theorists talk about anger as not something that happens to us, but rather something that we construct in our brain when we assign explanations to some event. So when I was pushing the stroller and I saw my husband pushing it in this kind of odd way, I started to build these explanations. As I said, these internal controllable causes for his behavior. And those causal attributions led to my anger. Okay. And they also say that anger and attributions have this recursive process. It's a self-reinforcing process where the more I hold someone responsible for some action, the angrier I am. And the angrier I get, the more I hold that person responsible. ([Time 0:05:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/47d70c17-4587-4e05-8690-e1ea1bbfb1ad)) - **Anger Pushes You To Act** - Anger creates action tendencies that push us to do something. - Venting is one of those actions but it does not necessarily reduce the anger that motivated it. Transcript: Jennifer Parlamis So it becomes self-reinforcing cycle. Now there's something else that happens with anger too. Anger has action tendencies. So it pushes us to act, to do something. It readies us for some action. And that's important because what I did was I vented as the action. I took my anger and I vented, but it didn't decrease my anger. ([Time 0:07:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b997205e-4122-4aaf-b6ca-c6e62ab294eb)) - **Don’t Rehearse Blame When You Vent** - Verbal venting fails because it rehearses internal, controllable attributions rather than changing them. - Venting to the offender reduced internal attributions and lowered anger, so target your conversation carefully. Transcript: Jennifer Parlamis And those two questions that I said at the beginning, one, if venting doesn't work, why not? And if venting doesn't work, why do we keep doing it? So my first research with my co-authors, we looked at venting verbally, which means expressing your anger forcefully to someone else. And we looked at the different targets. So we looked at either a friend, a third party, somebody who's not involved in the conflict, or the offender, the person involved in whatever conflict or anger-provoking incident We asked participants to recall. We also had a control group where they just recalled the anger, they didn't actually vent. And we wanted to see what happened and to see kind of the process, that first question, why isn't the venting working? And we found that when people vented to a friend, to a third party, they vented with more internal controllable attributions. And those internal controllable attributions led to that anger. And that's that self-reinforcing cycle that I just talked about a moment ago. When they vented to the offender, interestingly, they used fewer internal controllable attributions, and they actually felt less angry. So we realized, we concluded, the answer to why verbal venting doesn't work is because you're not changing those attributions. You're just rehearsing those attributions that led to your anger in the first place. ([Time 0:10:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/afa31894-a8b3-4f40-9082-85f841d2f92f)) - **Venting Feels Good Socially But Not Mentally** - People keep venting because it improves social and emotional tone even if anger stays the same. - Feeling heard reduces loneliness and boosts well-being without resolving the underlying attributions. Transcript: Jennifer Parlamis So what we did next was venting doesn't happen in a vacuum, right? There's usually somebody responding to us. So we said, let's look at responses now. And we asked the third party, that friend, to give some responses to the person venting. They either reinforced the interpretation, so those explanations, those internal controllable attributions. They would say something like, yeah, you're right to be angry. They are really selfish. That would be reinforcing. Or we asked them to reinterpret. Well, have you thought about some other possible causes for this? Maybe something external. In both cases, the anger didn't change. They remained angry no matter what the response was. However, we did measure a separate emotion, something that looked at overall well-being. We called it emotional tone. And we found that emotional tone did change significantly after getting a response from the other party. And this is what we thought and we concluded that this is why people keep venting. It's because venting is not just an emotional process. Venting is also a social and relational process. So we felt better, we felt heard, we felt less alone. ([Time 0:12:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/af007951-68f8-44ec-bd3c-660d6131b9cb)) - **Lower Arousal Reduces Anger** - Physiologically arousing activities like venting or exercise do not reduce anger. - Activities that lower physiological arousal (deep breathing, meditation, yoga) reliably reduce anger. Transcript: Jennifer Parlamis So, research by researchers at Ohio State University did a very recent 2024 meta-analysis where they looked at 40 years of venting research. And they found that physiologically arousing activities do not decrease anger. Verbal venting being one of those physiologically arousing activities. It raises your heart rate, it raises your blood pressure, that does not reduce anger. What does reduce anger across these 40 years of studies they found is actually activities that reduce your physiological arousal, things like meditation, deep breathing, yoga. ([Time 0:14:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5e30293c-8562-4bd3-b7e6-eadc018e7cb6)) - **Four Practical Steps To Manage Anger** - Use low-arousal techniques to regulate anger, like deep breathing or meditation. - Check your causal attributions, ask 'What don't I know?', and deliberate on the actions you'll take. Transcript: Jennifer Parlamis Here are four things you can do if you're looking to regulate your anger and then use it to direct it in the appropriate ways. Engage in low arousal activities. Check those causal attributions, right? So Freud talked about venting the steam. It's not about that. It's what's going through the pipe. Think about those attributions you're making. Be more conscious of that. Remember, you might want to gather some new information. What don't you know? Ask yourself that question. And then also be very deliberate about your actions. Consider what actions you're going to take. As I said, anger can be a useful emotion. ([Time 0:16:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a5d69448-c7a8-4bc3-8488-a829790201d8)) - **Yoga Revealed The Real Reason** - Parlamis updates the stroller story with her husband's yoga habit and her daughter's invitation. - Gathering facts replaced her urge to vent and preserved their relationship. Transcript: Jennifer Parlamis And finally, to wrap up, you might be wondering what my husband's up to these days. Well, Well, he's no longer a Wall Street lawyer and he actually is taking up yoga. And he does it usually right before dinner when the dishes, you know, need to be put on the table and maybe you might want to unload the dishwasher. And if I didn't know my research, I might say he's being really selfish. He's trying to get out of responsibilities. And I might vent. I might call my sister and vent about it, but I don't, but I do instead as I ask, what don't I know? I do a little more digging and you know, my daughter who was in the stroller so many years ago, well, she lives in London now. She's a huge fan of yoga and he's practicing a lot because she's invited him to a yoga retreat so that they can do together when they see each other next month. ([Time 0:16:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/fd9bcd55-7e0b-4494-8d9a-ffc4eb483a7e))