Name: Why Venting Doesn’t Help You Deal with Anger | Jennifer Parlamis | TED
Uploaded: 2025-11-26T21:04:40.000Z
Duration: 15 min 3 s
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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, 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.

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 expressed my anger forcefully to anybody who would listen.

But that venting didn't help release my anger.

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

And I know my dad doesn't care about looking cool.

And I said, I know I must be missing something here.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Now there's something else that happens with anger too.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

So my first research with my co authors, we looked at venting verbally, which means expressing your anger forcefully to someone else.

So we looked at either a friend, a third party, somebody who's not involved in the conflict, or the offender, 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.

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Why Venting Doesn’t Help You Deal with Anger | Jennifer Parlamis | TED

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