Despite the problems anger can cause, it's actually not bad for us. It played an important role in our survival. Martin says, “Anger alerts us to the fact that we have been wronged.”
And when your heart starts beating fast and your face turns red, these are signs of anger that increase blood flow in preparation for confrontation. "The fight-or-flight response is what motivates us to confront injustice," he explains.
Anger only becomes a problem when we can't control it and it controls us, and Martin struggled with that growing up. "My family would make fun of 'Martin's temper,' especially among the quick-tempered males," he recalls.
As a child, he would get scared when his father would yell at waiters in restaurants, and later he volunteered at a youth shelter at the university, where he saw teenagers who got into trouble because they couldn't control their anger. By the time he was preparing for his Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology, Martin knew he wanted to help people deal with these basic feelings.
He found out that anger management is about controlling thoughts, and while an outburst alerts us to a potential threat, no matter how small, it is the thoughts we have afterwards that determine our reaction. This is why strategies such as cognitive behavioral therapy, which teach people to think healthy, are so successful.
So Martin decided to dig deeper into the thoughts that accompany anger to find answers to these two questions: What are the angry thoughts that drive people to action? Could some be more harmful than others? Then he worked on developing a scale for evaluating and categorizing these thoughts.
Martin and his advisor, Eric Dahlen, started by running surveys in which they asked people to tell them what the last thing that made them angry was. Someone who takes your role in line, for example.
Drawing on the theoretical side of the work of cognitive behavioral therapists such as Aaron Beck and Jerry Deffenbacher, they have written down the thoughts people are likely to have if they live out these scenarios.
Martin and Dalen refined the survey questions through pilot studies, investigating situations that weren't irritating enough and thoughts that didn't mean anything to the participants.
Martin and Dalen eventually developed the Anger Perception Scale (ACS). The user reads a set of nine anger-inducing scenarios and rates how likely they are to respond to each of the six possible reactions. In this way, the Anger Perception Scale helps users decide which of the six thoughts they are likely to think of when they are angry.
That is useful because realizing whether our thoughts are angry and unhelpful and understanding the specific types of thoughts that come to us when we get angry allows us to be more aware and alert to our sudden reactions that can hurt us.
Although we tend to think that our emotions and thoughts are unique, they are not. The thoughts that people have when they are angry are very common, and they recur often, according to Martin. Here's an example: Imagine this situation: “You're driving in a residential area. Quietly and suddenly, someone almost hits you with their car while leaving their garage.” Scale 6 provides possible responses to this situation:
- "He did it on purpose to make me stop."
- "He almost broke my car."
- "Nobody knows how to drive these days."
- "I was passing through here first; they shouldn't have been in my way."
- "This stupid moron."
- "He must not have seen me."
Martin considers this last reaction to be adaptive, which means it will calm you down, while the first five are considered maladaptive and make you angrier about the situation. This may eventually lead you to respond in a way that you will regret later, and each of these maladaptive reactions involves an epistemological fallacy—false beliefs that are very common around the world and have names in cognitive behavioral psychology.
“He did it on purpose to make me stop” is a fallacy called misattributing causation; You can't know what a person's intentions are; "almost broke my car" is to "catastrophize" a minor problem and turn it into a disaster; "no one knows how to drive anymore" is to "overgeneralize" one event and counts it as universally true; “shouldn't have got in my way” is an unreasonable request on your part that others know what you are thinking and where you are heading; and “that stupid moron” is an “inflammatory labeling” that turns a person into a “moron” who deserves more insults.
The problem with thoughts that accompany feelings of anger is that they increase our anger and direct it toward ourselves and others. So in another study, Martin used the Anger Perception Scale with a group of undergraduate psychology students to see how their thoughts when angry affected them.
At the end of each day for 5 days, the students filled out a questionnaire to assess their feelings of happiness, sadness, anger, or fear, describing the situations that moved their feelings the most during the day and their impact on them. They chose the experiences they went through that day from a list of 17 options, and among them were six options Designed to indicate anger management issues, they are: drugs, negative emotions, aggression, self-harm, damaged friendships, and dangerous driving.
On the sixth day, the students handed in their surveys and completed a final survey that measured their anger in general and whether they tended to express or control that anger. They rated their anger using the Anger Perception Scale.
The results: Students who reported being more likely to think maladaptive thoughts tended to be generally angrier; they had a higher daily level of anger and expressed it in unhealthy ways. They also said they had days when their feelings were more negative and aggressive, and they drove more dangerously.
The stigmatizing type of thinking, or the use of demeaning or dehumanizing phrases such as "what an idiot," was associated with a greater number of damaged friendships, while people who had thoughts of wrong reasoning, unreasonable requests, and stigmatization reported that anger was their most prominent emotion, rather than fear, happiness, or grief.
Stigmatizing people turns out to be very toxic. “One of the first pieces of advice I give people is to focus on stigma, because that seems to be the problem for most people,” Martin says. Another statistical test showed that stigma scores had a stronger effect on measures of anger than other types of thoughts.
And it predicted the students' ability to control their anger toward others, their average anger, and their frequency of mentioning feelings of aggression and damage to their friendships.
These findings are similar to what Martin found in an earlier study using the Anger Perception Scale, in which he also measured participants' overall tendency to feel angry. He reported that the most obvious difference between angry and non-angry people was how often they tended to use stigma. Thoughts of this kind have particularly egregious effects, transforming a human colleague into an easily angry object.
For example, if a driver cuts you off and you describe him as an "idiot," even if you don't say it out loud, Martin says, "It overshadows his other qualities, until you somehow think of him in line with the quality you shot him."
The solution to stigmatization is empathy, and to illustrate what this means, Martin tells a story about one time when he was driving behind a car that was going very slowly. His first reaction was anger, which led him to label and insult the driver in his mind.
Then he remembered his search and stopped for a moment, putting himself in the driver's shoes. He realized that the driver might have been afraid. "If we start to think about other people in a different light, we reverse stigmatize them, and we may see that there is a good reason for their behavior," he says.
Martin wants us to listen to our anger and try to understand it instead of ignoring it. If anger is signaling to us that we have been wronged, then simply ignoring it won't help.
"What I really want is for people to think right, so that their thoughts accurately reflect what is going on in the world around them," Martin says.
For example, let's continue imagining the situation where the driver almost hits you with his car. If you think he "must not have seen you," Martin says, "you're probably lying to yourself." Instead of softening the situation as you just did or escalating it with insults or thoughts of revenge, you can focus on the fact that no harm was done. "It leads to a feeling of gratitude, so you feel calmer and you can act rationally," Martin says.
Or, in another situation included in the Anger Perception Scale test, suppose your roommate doesn't clean up the room after inviting his friends. In that case, instead of calling him rude or impulsive or generalizing that he always does it, Martin suggests confronting the situation head-on. When deciding how you'll deal with it, say, "Does that mean you have to live in a dirty house? Does that mean you have to talk to your roommate? Think about the real consequences." This kind of rational thinking can ease your anger.
While the Anger Perception Scale can reveal thoughts that accompany your feelings of anger, changing them takes time. Martin warns: "People should know that it takes practice. After we've spent our lives developing our habits of thinking, it's really hard to change them."
Among maladaptive reactions, Martin admits that he is prone to generalizing but adds, "When I notice the direction of my thinking, I can stop myself, and I can recognize that this is what's going on, but sometimes I don't want to notice." Martin usually alerts himself when he has a thought of anger, which is the first step towards eliminating its effect.
At first, it may take hours or even days for you to realize that you've been deafening your partner or that you're asking more of your co-workers than is reasonable, but you can practice noticing your anger and refocusing your attention, and this process happens every moment.
For the joke about "Martin's mood," Martin credits his research on anger for helping him learn how to keep his cool. “I still get angry a lot, but I think about my anger now more than most people do,” he says.
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