Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

psychology

Is Venting a Good Strategy for Overcoming Anger?

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Everybody gets mad and everybody likes to vent their anger.

It just feels great to yell, say something awful, or even break something. Some people might read that sentence and make fun of the whole thing. But, there is a great deal of music of various genres dedicated to lashing out in anger. Even country songs exist about destroying people’s trucks, etc. Legal literature goes into great detail about the relationship of anger to intent. And a great deal of people approve of angry outbursts as a form of positive expression.

Anger may start as a sudden shock of personal offense and instantly move to the deep desire to be avenged, to return insult for insult, or to visit destruction upon a whole tribe for the injury of one personal friend or confidant. Dallas Willard defines anger as a “response towards those who have interfered with us, it includes a will to harm them, or the beginnings thereof.” 

Of course, not all anger is bad. In fact, anger can be a very good thing. Richard Baxter wrote in his Christian Directory, “It [anger] is given us by God for good, to stir us up to a vigorous resistance of those things, which, within us or without us do oppose his glory or our salvation, or our own or our neighbour’s real good (Baxter, 290).” There are times when it is morally wrong not to be angery because the goods of human existence are being misappropriated for evil ends, people are being abused, the truth is being impugned, or God’s honor is being obscured by idolatry.

The problem with the cluster of coping practices called venting is that there exists a long and apparently clinically honored pedigree in their favor. Freud rather stupidly thought that practicing self-control led to pent up anger. Lorh et al argue in, The Psychology of Anger Venting and Empirically Supported Alternatives that Do No Harm,** that the common practice of giving psychological patients venting practices like punching pillows, yelling, tearing magazines, etc is actually normalizing the negative anger response. Then, “the good feeling that accompanies venting anger is likely to reinforce the venting and violence. People often mistake their enjoyment of these aggressive acts as a beneficial or therapeutic outcome (Lorh 2007, 56).”

This makes sense. Aristotle basically described the human person as a collection of habits. Freud preferred the notion that we’re really bundles of neuroses and that any good habit is you develop is really a repression of some deviant behavior that is actually better for you.

Aristotle’s way of describing human beings makes more sense to me, and it anticipated better research thousands of years in advance. Lorh, again,

“When people are highly aroused, they may not think much about their behavior and its consequences. Instead they revert to what they have learned to do (or what is permissible) in similar situations. If a person has learned to react to frustrating events by venting (e.g., hitting something), it may make little difference whether the object is animate or inanimate.”

(Lohr, 62)

The observable reality was not lost on Richard Baxter (who lived prior to Freud, statistical analysis, or Baumeister) when he wrote:

Direct. V. ‘Command your tongue, and hand, and countenance, if you cannot presently command your passion.’ And so you will avoid the greatest of the sin, and the passion itself will quickly be stifled for want of vent. You cannot say that it is not in your power to hold your tongue or hands if you will. Do not only avoid that swearing and cursing which are the marks of the profane, but avoid many words till you are more fit to use them, and avoid expostulations, and contending, and bitter, opprobrious, cutting speeches, which tend to stir up the wrath of others. And use a mild and gentle speech, which savoureth of love, and tendeth to assuage the heat that is kindled. “A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.” And that which mollifieth and appeaseth another, will much conduce to the appeasing of yourselves.

Richard Baxter, William Orme, The Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter, vol. 3 (London: James Duncan, 1830), 296.

If you learn to control your tongue and your body when you cannot turn off your feelings, then eventually your passions will follow the habits of your body. This is not necessarily true without the context of a broader system of life with time for contemplation of the Scriptures, prayer, service to the poor, trust in Jesus Christ to forgive those who wrong you, etc. But, it is true and replicable enough that a study of several populations of people who practiced venting or different versions of reflection upon frustrating circumstances (either alone or with a group) has shown that without religious context, a reflective approach to anger is much better than a venting one. If you wish to read the rest of Baxter’s chapter on anger it is available here (its a pdf, so scroll down to page 284).

Conclusion: Anger is a problem-solving reflex and should be treated as such. Venting by punching, yelling, or being morose simply trains us in bad habits, but looking for specific problems to solve turns anger into an energizing force for good.

*I have no idea if this kind of thing is common knowledge. I learned about it helping somebody write a research paper about corporate liability in cases of poorly tested medical equipment. Is there a guilty mind when shortcuts are taken with knowledge of the potential effects of those short cuts (the common sense answer is yes, but the legal answer might not be so clear)? But to determine that I had to read about intent in several other sorts of cases.

**Lohr, Jeffrey M., Bunmi O. Olatunji, Roy F. Baumeister, and Brad J. Bushman. 2007. “THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ANGER VENTING AND EMPIRICALLY SUPPORTED ALTERNATIVES THAT DO NO HARM.” Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice 5

Growth and Biblical Wisdom

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Everybody has a self-theory, some hypothesis or doctrine about what/who they are. Some of these theories are simple sentences like, “I’m an athlete.” Others are more fundamental, like, “I’m worthless.” According to Carol Dweck and Daniel Molden, our self-theories lead directly to our self-esteem maintenance/repair strategies after we fail at a task or to reach a goal. (Dweck, 130-131). They have distilled the various self-theories into two helpful categories.

The Self Theories:

  1. Entity theory:
    Entity theory is the theory that all of your personal traits are fixed in place.
  2. Incremental Theory:
    The incremental theory of the self is the theory that no matter who you are, your qualities and abilities can be improved upon.

Two strategies of self-esteem repair:

  1. Fixed/Static View
    It is often found that those who hold to the entity theory, because of the assumption that change is impossible, also have a static view of self-esteem repair. These people repair their self-esteem by avoidance of activities that are difficult. Adherents to this self-theory also utilize comparison of their performance to examples who performed even more poorly than themselves to bolster their sense of worth/skill.
  2. Growth View
    Those who hold to the incremental self-theory, because of the assumption that change is possible, adopt a growth perspective on self-esteem repair. These individuals use strategies like examination of deficits and practicing unattained skills.  They are also more likely to utilize comparison of personal performance to those who performed even better to understand why they succeeded.

Can you guess which self-theory and which strategies tend to be associated with success? If you guessed, “the incremental theory and the growth view,” you guessed correctly.

In the book of Proverbs, the self-theory assumed by the author is the incremental theory. The author assumes that people can change:

Pro 8:1-5 ESV  Does not wisdom call? Does not understanding raise her voice?  (2)  On the heights beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand;  (3)  beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries aloud:  (4)  “To you, O men, I call, and my cry is to the children of man.  (5)  O simple ones, learn prudence; O fools, learn sense.

And as one would expect from somebody who holds the incremental view, the author of Proverbs recommends responding to personal failures and challenges with a growth strategy:

  1. Pro 9:8b-9a Reprove a wise man and he will love you. Instruct a wise man, and he will grow wiser.
  2. Pro 15:5  A fool despises his father’s instruction, but whoever heeds reproof is prudent.
  3. Pro 15:12  A scoffer does not like to be reproved; he will not go to the wise.
  4. Pro 15:32  Whoever ignores instruction despises himself, but he who listens to reproof gains intelligence.

The whole book basically indicates that one of the main differences between the wise and the unwise is that the wise are willing to face correction and improve. They admit their flaws and errors. They do so whether the flaws pertain to morality, character, knowledge, skill, or anything else.

Conclusion

Learning to change our perspective on failures and internal shame is very difficult. We often feel painfully ashamed of failures, mistakes, and sins. This shame can paralyze us into being unable to admit fault. It can even force us into hiding our flaws and dwelling only on our positive traits and thus can prevent change. It is all the better to admit personal failures of morals, knowledge, and skill. Fessing up to oneself, to God, and to other people is a liberating experience. In so doing, shame can become the sort of sorrow that leads to repentance and personal transformation. One good article on the subject can be found here: Why I Like When Other Men Make Me Feel Bad About Myself.

Works Cited:

Andrew J Elliot and Carol S Dweck, Handbook of Competence and Motivation (New York: Guilford Press, 2005).

Appendix:

Though the author of Proverbs assumes that you and I can change, he is a realist. You and I have all known people that we worry about because they keep making bad decisions. The fear is that eventually it might be too late to change. Proverbs does notice that some people will want to change their habits at the last minute before a calamity. They procrastinate. They hope to perhaps utilizing a montage strategy. “Oh, I messed around all year and have to make a 100 on the final and only have 8 hours to study…wisdom come save me with clips of fun, hard work, and sweet music!” Kind of like in Rocky, Revenge of the Nerds, the Muppets Movie, and Mulan:

Wisdom, in the book of Proverbs, is personified as a cosmically powerful female prophet who represents the highest aspirations of human motherhood, the ultimate wife, and the most wise sister a young man could have. Young men typically love women, this is probably why the literary device is used. The book is written for young men, but it clearly applies to women as well. Anyway, here is what Lady Wisdom says after being ignored until the last minute before a disaster:

Pro 1:24-27  Because I have called and you refused to listen, have stretched out my hand and no one has heeded,  (25)  because you have ignored all my counsel and would have none of my reproof,  (26)  I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when terror strikes you,  (27)  when terror strikes you like a storm and your calamity comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you.

If you refuse to change your character long enough, you won’t be able to suddenly make the necessary repairs in order to succeed. I tried this in Hebrew as an undergrad. You cannot study at the last minute for Hebrew and succeed.

The Seared Conscience

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Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer. (1 Timothy 4:1-5)

What does it mean to have a seared conscience? It’s something like seared flesh. The top layer is dead and insensitive to pain. To have a seared conscience is something like the experience of doing, over and over, that which you just know to be wrong until you stop listening to your moral intuitions all together. Peter writes of a similar experience:

For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than after knowing it to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them. (2 Peter 2:20-21)

Again, why is it worse? Acting in the face of consciences condemnation slowly puts your conscience to death. For the Christian, sanctification is the two-fold process of listening to conscience and reforming conscience where it is in error. To desensitize conscience makes you, from a personal-social standpoint, irredeemable. That’s why the author of Hebrews says that people who are subjecting Christ to crucifixion all over again by their public actions cannot repent. They’re too busy intentionally stifling the truth to be able to hear its call.

Interestingly, this ancient piece of observational psychology has been discovered anew:

“Moral incongruence, in this case, the experience of disapproving of IPU [internet pornography use] while still using it, seems to be a key variable in predicting a host of important outcomes associated with pornography use, not the least of which is perceived addiction to internet pornography.”

Doing what you know or feel to be bad and deriving pleasure from it [at least with respect to porn] leads you to feel trapped in that behavior. I wonder if this holds true in other areas like drug use, losing your temper, failure to exercise, over eating, etc. And if so, what are the options? Convincing people to give up on their moral positions? If wrong, this makes sense. But maybe this is where a therapeutics of personal responsibility might be useful. The stoics recommended taking responsibility for everything you experience/do. The Lord tells Cain something similar. Thomas Saasz recommends jettisoning the notion that mental disorders are anything other than repetitive behaviors for which people can take responsibility.

I certainly don’t want a seared conscience.

Book Review: Stuart Ritchie’s Intelligence: All that matters

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Stuart Ritchie, Intelligence: All That Matters. (Hodder & Stoughton, Kindle Edition 2016).

As an educator and leader, I try to stay up to date on research into personality and human potential. But sometimes I cannot keep up with recent findings. Stuart Ritchie’s new book helped fill the gaps.

Dr. Ritchie is a post-doc researcher at the University of Edinburgh where he is researching the development/decline of intelligence across the life span.

The point of the book is essentially to clarify the facts of the case with reference to intelligence:

“The research shows that intelligence test scores are meaningful and useful; that they relate to education, occupation and even health; that they are genetically influenced; and that they are linked to aspects of the brain. (44-45)”

Through the book Ritchie deftly explains the research with reference to each of these issues. For me to go through how he shows this would make the book superfluous. But some of the most interesting points are:

  1. The differences between male and female intelligence are not in terms of the average, but in terms of the outliers. The mean IQ of men and women is roughly 100. But men skew more toward very low IQs and very high IQs. More men are significantly below average and more men are significantly above average (1226).
  2. While eugenicists were interested in early IQ research, the earliest intelligence scientists were interested in helping the less intelligent to succeed. Not only so, but just like the Nazi discovery of a connection between smoking and cancer, the findings of the early eugenicist IQ researchers have been supported by later research (1192).
  3. Multiple intelligences theory isn’t backed by current scientific research (355).
  4. “Nevertheless, we’re lucky that the tools for raising intelligence – which might partly have caused the Flynn Effect – seem to be staring us in the face, in the form of education.” (1168-70)

The take away of the book is basically this: Intelligence, which can be measured by IQ, matters. The books that claim that hard work is more important than IQ are likely mistaken. Also, education appears to actually increase people’s IQ. This part is really important and while Ritchie never mentions him, it coinheres nicely with Arthur Whimbey’s research on training people in sequential problem solving and slowly improving their processing speed.

If you’re an educator, psychologist, parent, or political science major, I recommend that you read this book.

Science Fact of the Day #3: The Bargaining Model of Depression

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Today we’ll look at a fairly recent model of depression: the bargaining model.

In a 2003 book edited by Peter Hammerstein, Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation, chapter 6 is an essay (I believe based on a talk) on this model, “The Bargaining Model of Depression.”

The author, Edward Hagen, proposes depression might be explained as a strategy to gain assistance and support from powerful members of a social group by members which are weaker. This is due to the difficulty that physically or socially weaker people have utilizing force, threats of force, or persuasive rhetoric to achieve their goal (96-97).

The idea then is that the depressed person is acting in a fashion that is costly both to themselves and to the group, but that the group will perceive the loss of activity and exuberance from the individual as too costly to endure and therefore provide assistance to the individual or make changes to the group on their account (100). All of this is proposed as unconscious.

One interesting observation in the paper was this:

“It is not yet apparent whether depression symptoms themselves help enable “fresh starts” (or would have in the EEA), but this is, of course, precisely the proposed function of depression. It is therefore encouraging that “fresh starts” are closely associated with the remission of depression and may even cause it. (101)”

The idea that fresh starts may cause the remission of depression counts as evidence for the model because often the fresh starts come can come as the result of help from roommates, spouses, and near-by family. Interestingly, in cases with less social contact, depression is more likely to continue without obstacle (101). Lots of other research demonstrates this to be the case.

The model isn’t entirely persuasive to me, but elsewhere Hagen has found some evidence in favor of the model. For instance, lower grip strength predicts depression.

Anyway, that’s one model for depression among many.

Any thoughts?

Virtue Building: How to Grow Any Habit

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Why Pursue Virtue?

It’s hard to say exactly what makes any particular person want to become virtuous or develop a good habit.

For many it is a religious conversion.

For others it’s a realization that debt, porn, or drugs have ruined their lives, as bad habits can become a hell on earth.

Some people conclude that virtue truly is a worthy goal because they know that human beings are supposed to seek that which is good. They come to agree with Teddy Roosevelt,

“Bodily vigor is good, and vigor of intellect is even better, but far above both is character.”1

Ultimately, of course, the desire for virtue has to do with how to become happy and how to flourish.2

So you want virtue, but what then?

But once somebody wants virtue (good habits, moral and otherwise), they have to start taking real-world steps to get there. If they don’t they’ll regularly feel defeated or inadequate or worse, they’ll actually become morally worse. Roosevelt observed this in a paragraph about idealistic statesmen:

But the possession or preaching of these high ideals may not only be useless, but a source of positive harm, if unaccompanied by practical good sense, if they do not lead to the effort to get the best possible when the perfect best is not attainable— and in this life the perfect best rarely is attainable.3

So, what does it take to get virtue? Well there are two obvious things to say. First, we need to know what virtue is and the virtues are. Then, we need to know specific actions that will lead to good habits. From these two obvious matters there’s an important mental trick for learning any new thing:

Imagine the most virtuous person you know and act as though you were this person in your shoes.

In other words, fake it till you make it. Now, I don’t mean that you should emulate their interests, sense of humor, or other mere personality traits. But rather their honesty, discipline, kindness, mindset, spirituality, and prudence.

What I’m saying is counter-intuitive. Faking virtue seems like hypocrisy, the polar opposite of virtue.4 But this isn’t exactly true. When one does math problems or basketball drills before they fully understand them, they are “pretending” as they go through the motions until they acquire understanding and skill. The hypocrisy would be claiming basketball expertise while still faking it. With virtue, hypocrisy would be claiming to have traits one secretly does not have or worse, that one secretly despises.5

C.S. Lewis, a classics scholar and no stranger to the study of virtue academically and personally observed this:

“Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already. That is why children’s games are so important. They are always pretending to be grown-ups— playing soldiers, playing shop. But all the time, they are hardening their muscles and sharpening their wits so that the pretence of being grown-up helps them to grow up in earnest.”6

Similarly, in his essay on compensation Emerson wrote:

The law of nature is, Do the thing, and you shall have the power: but they who do not the thing have not the power.7

So, how do you become a good person? A virtuous person? I’d suggest that you first admit that you’re not. But then start acting like a virtuous person.

Two Case Studies

If you want to get out of debt, find the things people who have no debt do and then do those things. If you treat your life, temporarily like a movie, think of it as a story where in the third act you suddenly realized how stupid it is to have negative money and became a financially wise person because you realized how much you wanted to help others by investing in small businesses. So, you start living like this different person until you are out of debt and have a surplus of cash for investments. At this point, the temptation is to start living like Act 1 again, but this got you into debt. So you continue living in the montage that changed your life, but the point being that your “faking it” until it becomes who you are.

Think about the amount of fake outrage people have over politics. They often pretend to be angry, offended, and deeply morally concerned on an emotional level on the internet about all of these people who don’t know them, that they will never meet, and who don’t care if they live or die. But what is so interesting is that this election has brought the emotional moral posturing of the hyperreality online into the real world. People go into hysterics over politics as though disagreeing or agreeing with this or that idea is a deeply offensive issue. In this case people have taken the vice of intemperance and pretended to be emotionally unhinged until it weakened their minds in the real world.

Similar strategies work for overcoming porn addiction, losing weight, starting to tell the truth, and controlling your emotions. Negatively “do the thing and have the power” works for bad habits as well.

References

1 Roosevelt, Theodore. The Strenuous Life, Essays and Addresses (Kindle Location 941). Vook, Inc.. Kindle Edition. Read Ecclesiastes to see how an ancient man saw that bodily, sensory, and intellectual vigor still lead to dissatisfaction without ethical vigor.

2 Virtue is not opposed to happiness. Weirdly, even when many modern authors in favor of virtue ethics write about virtue ethics, they have very little to say about individual human beings or their families experiencing happiness, contentment, prosperity, or success.

3 Roosevelt, Theodore. The Strenuous Life, Essays and Addresses (Kindle Locations 1100-1102). Vook, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

4 This is especially so in a modern world where the Socratic ideal of self-realization and personal growth in education has been subsumed under the head of an ethics of authenticity wherein being “true to yourself” as you are in the moment without consideration of the fact that you’re an instance of a larger category of humans with a shared nature is considered paramount to happiness. So people are stuck with no ideals except those which they feel are ideal regardless of whether they correspond with the very essence of being human.

5 I suspect that nearly every politician despises most of their voters as well as the values they themselves espouse. A weird example in another direction is the “nice guy” who feels that being so nice doesn’t help him and secretly resents his niceness and the people by whom he feels rejected but desires so much to be seen as nice that he can never assert himself. It’s a pretty sick way to live, but it appears very common especially among college students who ask me for advice at work or in relationships.

6 Lewis, C. S.. Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics) (p. 188). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

7 Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson (p. 33). . Kindle Edition.

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