A popular belief exists in todays society that suppressing angers or frustrations and

allowing them to grow internally will ultimately create more problems and result in an extremely
negative outburst of the pent up emotions. Accordingly, many people tend to believe that
venting is a healthier and more effective approach to dealing with these negative feelings.
Adults commonly tell children to scream into or even hit a pillow when angered instead of letting
the anger fester inside of them. I have received this or similar advice many times throughout my
life and have suggested it to numerous friends or family members as well. However,
psychologists have conducted studies with results that dispute the popular belief that rumination
(venting) allows people to overcome anger or frustration more quickly and effectively than
distraction or simply doing nothing at all.
To test the validity of the theory that venting anger leads to a lesser amount of aggression
than distraction or doing nothing, researchers ran a controlled experiment. The participants in
the study consisted of 300 male and 300 female undergraduate psychology students. The 600
total participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups with each group containing 100
males and 100 females. The groups represented the three experimental conditions; there was a
rumination group, a distraction group, and a control group in which the participants did nothing
to try to reduce anger. In order to preserve the integrity of the experiment, the participants were
blind to its true nature; they believed the study was designed to test first impressions.
Researchers angered the participants by first instructing them to write a short essay and then
returning the essays with extremely negative feedback and evaluations. The participants
believed that other participants, or their partners, provided the negative feedback; in reality,
there were no partners at all. After angering all the participants, those in the rumination group
were encouraged to hit a punching bag and shown pictures of their partners. Members of the
distraction group were told to think about becoming physically fit while hitting the punching bag
and shown photos of people from health and fitness magazines. Finally, the members of the
control group sat quietly for two minutes under the impression that the researcher was fixing a
malfunctioning computer. In the last stage of the experiment, half of the participants completed
a mood survey followed by a reaction test in which they were given the opportunity to
administer loud blasts of noise to their partners. The other half completed the reaction test
before the mood survey.
After analyzing the results of the experiment, the researchers found no significant
difference in positive mood between the groups. However, they did find that members of the
rumination group felt angrier than members of both the distraction and control groups did.
Furthermore, members of the control group displayed the least aggressive behavior. The results
suggest that rumination only breeds more anger and aggression, and college students who do
nothing after being angered tend to feel less angry and act less aggressively than those who vent.
However, because the sample only consisted of college students, more experiments would have
to be performed in order to conclude that these results apply to the rest of the population.