To put the icing on the proverbial cake, Bushman conducted a series of experiments to either prove the truth of the assumption or expose its falsity with over 600 participants. In his handy introduction to the subject, he traces the idea of catharsis back to its Freudian roots - Freud believed deeply that repression was the source of many of our psychological maladies - and lists research studies, one after the other, that failed to validate the claim that venting decreases anger. That’s exactly what a study by Brad Bushman found 17 years ago - yes, cultural myths die hard - when he challenged the idea of anger and catharsis in a series of experiments. So, if you’re trying to sort things out - as an unloved daughter must - anger isn’t helpful. As it happens, the anger prime didn’t just raise blood pressure, but also changed activity within the brain itself additionally, anger increased the reaction time to lexical cues and interfered with semantic decision-making, a relatively high-level cognitive process. During the course of the experiments, after priming the participants subliminally either with the words “anger” or “relax,” both blood pressure readings and MRIs were performed to see the primes’ effect on lexical ability. The researchers wanted to test what priming for anger would do to a specific thought process - in this case, identifying real words from non-words. Garfinkel, Emma Zorab, and others made clear.
Our bodily sensations are the external manifestations of a process that’s going on in our brains and disrupts our ability to think, as the work of Sarah N.
Human beings are hardwired to get angry it’s an emotion that’s part of our self-protective gear, also known as the stress response or, more popularly, “fight or flight.” There isn’t one of us who doesn’t know what anger feels like in the body - “seeing red” isn’t just a metaphor in this case - and all of us have experienced the hot flush, the heart-pumping moment that accompanies anger.
What anger is, and how it can get in your way
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