Why We Need To Rethink The Way We Talk About Anger

Anger is a complex emotion, one we always tend to associate with negativity and perhaps aggression despite the fact that it's simply a feeling, just like any of our other ones.

What's more, anger is deeply gendered: Mainstream cultural norms hold that women are overly emotional except for anger, which is ugly and unfeminine, whereas men are said to have excessive anger. The stereotypes don't hold up to research1, however. When researchers ask men and women to self-report their anger experiences, there's no difference between the two as far as the frequency, intensity, or duration of their anger. Where men and women tend to diverge, instead, is how they express their anger: Men are much more likely to use physical aggression as a means of conveying anger.

Both teen girls and teen boys certainly experienced anger, but there were some gendered trends as far as the ways they each tended to view their anger. For example, the boys were more likely to describe specific instances of angry outbursts, whereas the girls tended to describe anger through stories of ongoing emotional difficulty.

Specifically, 65% of boys (compared to 7% of girls) described "singular episodes of anger," such as being angry after a bike broke or after losing a video game. "Those stories were not related to any repeatable or serious problems, but instead described commonplace incidents that could happen to anybody. In this thematic category, the focus was mainly, and often exclusively, on the outside world that provoked the anger," lead researchers Magdalena Budziszewska and Karolina Hansen write in the paper on the study's findings.

Anger is perhaps the most maligned and misunderstood emotion of all; we're exceedingly anxious to shut it down when we feel it, to fear or be repulsed by others who display it, and to try to avoid it at all costs. But like with any other emotion, not being able to understand or process our anger can lead to a lot of psychological distress. We know from past scientific studies that suppressing our emotions can be detrimental to both our physical and mental health, not to mention our relationships.

The ways we talk about and conceptualize anger can play a big role in how we deal with it.

This theory holds anger to be less a "spontaneous reaction to some frustrating events" and more of a "long-term and debilitating condition, something burdening, and difficult to resolve."

The teens who held this view of anger described associated behaviors like isolating themselves from others, crying, and even getting headaches, and the anger seemed to be something "heavy" that weighed them down and left them feeling weak. Moreover, the cause of the anger in these stories was hard to pinpoint; rather than being about something specific that happened to them to trigger an outburst, the context was general, internal frustration with the state of life itself.

This theory sees anger as a much more immediate, directional emotion, something pointed at a specific person or situation. The teens who held this view of anger focused specifically on "people perceived as flawed, mistaken, and deserving of blame" and on the "external world, not on the self."

"The behavioral expressions were often strong, outward-oriented, impulsive, accompanied by an outburst of energy (e.g., shouting, cursing others, blaming others), and/or physical aggression," the researchers wrote. "The experiential and bodily felt quality of anger was hot, impulsive, connected to a rising energy level, light, quick, with an excess of strength, and like a tension striving for release. An important motif was having or lacking control over oneself during this kind of anger. The temporal duration was rather short, it began rapidly and diminished with time, and had an 'explosive' quality that was intense but short-lived."

Anger here is additionally viewed as something explicitly evil or hateful.

About a third of the anger narratives the teens told were neither anger as burden nor anger as outburst (31% of girls and 39% of boys).

Indeed, anger can be a wonderfully positive, righteous, and even empowering emotion. It can be a way of asserting your own value, a way to remind yourself that you matter and the things that happen to you matter. It can be the driving force leading you to defend yourself and the things you care about.