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.

This is when you over-attribute the causes for someone's behavior to something internal to them, something internal and controllable, rather than to some external cause.

So you under-emphasize the external or situational causes that might be really the explanations for someone's behavior.

So at that moment, I started to get really curious about venting because I thought that was helping me in some way.

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 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?

OK, 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.

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.

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.

So let me make this a little bit more personal for just a moment.

And I want you to think about your own experience with anger.

If you can, take a moment right now and recall a time where you felt angry at someone.

It could be maybe someone at work, maybe in traffic, maybe politics.

Think about what you're angry about.

And now think about those causal attributions, those explanations that you have for why this is happening.

Why did this anger-provoking event occur?

So just take one pause and think about that.

Did you make internal controllable attributions?

So maybe you got cut off in traffic.

Did you say, oh, that person's so inconsiderate?

Something about them that they had control over.

Or maybe someone did something else and you said, oh, they're so selfish.

Or if you're thinking about maybe some particular politicians, oh, they're such a narcissist, or they're incompetent.

Maybe you thought that.

Maybe, however,

you made some external attributions.

So maybe you said something like, well, they were late because of the snowstorm, something that they're not in control over.

Or they had a family emergency.

If you make external attributions, you tend not to get angry or less so.

You may actually feel some empathy or sadness.

And if you blame yourself for a negative behavior or a negative event, you might feel shame.

So every attribution kind of relates to particular emotions.

Now, how many of you, after this event, this anger that I asked you just to recall a moment ago, how many of you actually vented?

Maybe a show of hands.

Some of you, yeah, okay.

So some people vent as a way to deal with their anger, like I did.

You would be in very good company because Freud, Sigmund Freud, advocated venting as a way to manage your anger.

He actually talked about something called the hydraulic model.

So the hydraulic model, he compared anger inside an individual to steam inside a hot pipe.

And if you didn't vent the steam from the pipe, the pipe would explode.

And similarly, he said, if people don't somehow release their anger through venting verbally, they would then act out.

They would become aggressive.

So this metaphor, it was very compelling.

It stuck.

People believed in it, and they kept doing it.

However, as I said just a little moment ago, most of the research on venting shows that it doesn't work.

So let's get to my research 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?

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.

Okay, so answer to question one.

But that didn't answer question two, which is why do we keep doing it if it's not releasing our anger?

So

What we did next was venting doesn't happen in a vacuum.

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 with 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 ask 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.

So we vented.

And so that's the answer to the second question.

Why do we keep doing it?

Because we might not be impacting our anger, but we are feeling better overall.

That's not the whole story.

One more thing.

So when I asked you before, some people raised their hand about venting.

Maybe some people do other things when they get angry.

Maybe you go for a really long run.

Some people said yes, yeah.

Sometimes you go to the gym, maybe work out.

Maybe you scream into a pillow.

Well, bad news, that doesn't help either.

So 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.

So what I'm saying here is really, I want to say one thing really important.

Anger isn't bad.

Anger is actually a motivator to do something.

It has that action tendency.

And anger can get you out of a bad relationship.

It can motivate you to leave a job when you have a toxic boss.

It can allow you to stand up when you think that there's an injustice.

It can have you fight for rights.

So anger is a really useful emotion.

However, we have to know how to regulate it.

Otherwise, we won't be using it, it will be using us.

So we have to think about better ways to regulate our anger.

Venting isn't doing it.

Okay?

So this TED conference today is about building bridges.

And when I vented about my husband with the weird stroller pushing that he did,

I wasn't building a bridge between us.

I was actually making more distance between us.

But what does and could build bridges are things that come out of this research that I've talked about today.

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.

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.

You just want to be in charge of the actions you take.

And finally, to wrap up, you might be wondering what my husband's up to these days.

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 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.

What I do instead is 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.

So if you're, um, if you feel yourself that little spark of anger, don't vent, check those attributions and do a little yoga.

Thank you.