Jennifer Parlamis

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?