Anger is eliminated with the disposal of a paper written because of provocation
nature.com
nature.com
> "Whenever Abraham Lincoln felt the urge to tell someone off, he would compose what he called a “hot letter.” He’d pile all of his anger into a note, “put it aside until his emotions cooled down,” Doris Kearns Goodwin once explained on NPR, “and then write [on the rear side of the sheet of paper]: ‘Never sent. Never signed.’ ” Which meant that Gen. George G. Meade, for one, would never hear from his commander in chief that Lincoln blamed him for letting Robert E. Lee escape after Gettysburg."
From: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/opinion/sunday/the-lost-a...
Just writing it down and filing it also seemed to help, just not as much.
I don't know, this is just speculation. Mainly because the cost of producing a duplicate letter (for ones actually sent, not this case) was sufficiently high that I assume there wasn't a culture that could make use of such duplicates.
There's really no reason to believe this was a motivation for Lincoln to write a letter, particularly because there is no clear reason for him to be concerned for CYA. The only people Lincoln would be accountable would be the voters, and I don't see producing a letter blaming Meade for letting Lee escape to be something that would pass muster. I mean, what's the argument here? "I was angry at Meade at the time, and here's the letter proving that I was angry"?
So it seems reasonable to conclude that this is an example of anger management, and not a political back up plan.
disposal is the solution.
paper is the tool.
Writing changes your thoughts from abstract to concrete - and once a thought is "out of your head" on paper, it becomes an entity that you can perform additional thought operations on (which you can then write down...etc.).
Analog writing also leaves visual evidence of your thought process across a page. Most digital writing tools allow you to make the thought process disappear completely as you work. Having evidence of your thought process allows you to evaluate your thought process. Very important in any kind of problem solving exercise.
As a child, I found that writing down a thought that bothered me made it go away and freed my brain up to do kid stuff.
They didn't study anything in-between, such as removing the reminder without throwing it away.
It’s not outside the realm of possibility that watching cartoons for ten minutes or just sitting in silence would produce a comparable reduction in anger. Really disappointing that a pair of career academics could get away with such an astounding oversight (and get published in Nature, no less).
I thought this was absurd and scrolled down to methods/data. I had never heard of Nature before, or rather, I had no reason to trust it.
I find it interesting/unfortunate Academia can get away with being Authority based.
Not all journals or researchers are equal. Reputation is an important filter. In the very long run truth will emerge. In the short term, however, it’s one of our best signals.
The Catholic Church appreciates your confidence. Science weeps.
In theory, being published in a top journal means multiple specialists in the subject matter reviewed the paper and therefore it's more trustworthy than a random authority's assertion.
Reality is more Yikes.
But about your cousin's method: If you have never heard of "Nature" even though it is one of the biggest names out there, then you have no reason to trust it, of course.
On the other hand, if you have already read hundreds of papers published by them in your field, and those were above average in quality, trusting that name does make a lot of sense imho.
'tis well with thy seniors to fight?
They prosper who burn in the morning
the letters they wrote overnight.
For some there be, shelved and forgotten,
With nothing to thank for their fate,
Save that (on a half-sheet of foolscap,)
Which a fool 'Had the Honour to state.'"
- Capt. R. A. Hopwood, Royal Navy (Retired), "The Laws of the Navy," 1898
Inflammatory writ by Joanna Newsom.
And as for my inflammatory writ?
Well, I wrote it and I was not inflamed one bit
I had a similar experience having first heard monkey and bear on the radio, but the dj failed to name the track and artist.
Then some time later I heard Inflammatory Writ on an internet radio provider so was able to see the artist’s name.
In addition to immediately recognizing that distinct voice, I also recognized her beautifully dense poetry.
A true bard.
Here, for example, only a 1-ish point change occurred on a six point scale from 3 to 2. I say 1-ish because the confidence intervals are rather wide and even intersect somewhat (see discussion.)
So anger is not eliminated rather you'll be somewhat less angry.
There is another cause, more pernicious, which is that in the absence of a big effect, "a significant effect of X on Y was found" sells better than "no large effect was found", because there is a bias towards reporting positive effects in the litterature. In my field, it is actually usual for people to take big surveys, iterate dozens of statistical models with any kind of interactions, and only report one where some interesting parameters end up being significant, and derive policy recommendations based on this. Which is a recipe for non reproducible results.
I feel this is one of the two basic tricks that many many papers do to preemptively justify their existence. The other being the shoehorning of the hotbutton issue of the day and imagining some way the study addresses that issue.
It was kind of weird watching the transition from when every second paper could obliquely assist in the fight against AIDS to now when they seem to assist in the fight against climate change.
I feel like it is a minor dishonesty committed to combat the unreasonable requirement for every scientific discovery to be immediately applicable.
For example, if a person suffering from a bout of depression, were to write their depressed feelings "there is no point, no hope" etc.. then rip the paper up and throw it away, might it have any effect on their mood?
He was brilliant and a good person. No one ever had anything bad to say about him. I mean that literally. People liked him.
His life kind of stalled out. He was feeling his way back to normalcy, and then abruptly gave up. There were a lot of things I wish he had tried before he reached this point. Maybe writing things down and then symbolically burning them would have helped. Or psychedelics. Or just explicitly seeking help or accepting it when it was offered instead of just muddling through.
You can find his comments here if you search for jwmhjwmh.
But thanks for sticking up for me.
I remember a WAMU radio show talking about a woman who was abused by her father.
She wrote the 5 steps of forgiveness which as I more or less recall go something like this:
The 5 steps of asking for forgiveness.
The offender to the offended should:
1. Describe in detail exactly what he/she/they did that cause the offense. 2. Describe in detail how those actions made the offended feel. 3. Explain in detail why he/she/they took such actions. 4. Describe in detail what corrective actions he/she/they should take. 5. Describe in detail what the offended could do to move forward.
Now the interesting part is that the woman's father was already dead when she wrote the steps. She wrote a letter using the 5 steps as if she was her father, who denied to his death that the abuse ever happened, asking for forgiveness.
It helped her.
I wished I could remember the name of the book or the radio show but it was years ago.
I believe Henny Youngman, one-liner comedian said:
"Yesterday was Yom Kippur, I went a bought a Mercedes" ;)
For me, forgiveness can only occur when I understand someone's point of view and determine that there was information I wasn't aware of or they made a mistake and what they did isn't really who they are.
But when I read about forgiveness it seems like people also use the term to refer to a process of gaslighting yourself and/or making up a fake story to detach yourself from reality.
Frankly, I see a lot of therapy this way. Some people go through terrible things, and some people's lives suck, but a lot of therapy sounds like brainwashing yourself to deal with it.
And while "brainwashing" sounds like an intellectually dishonest technique, we need to remember that the brain is not a perfectly logical instrument. The trauma that people seek help for carries an emotional toll usually in excess of the simple logical "disagreement". Therapy for such trauma is usually an emotional process, not a logical one.
I would agree though that "forgiveness" is maybe not the best term for this.
Does that make sense?
This is basically the foundation of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or as I called it recently in another thread, "self gaslighting"
Imagine if all that effort was directed towards a different intent.
If it works, then who cares? Maybe you were wronged, but maybe you don't want to go through life feeling that way, so you let it go by sympathizing with the person who wronged you. And you move on. There's a limited amount of justice you'll be able to get in life, so it's a good idea to pick your battles and not stew on every single sleight because you want to avoid "brainwashing" yourself.
The first thing to note is that time itself has healing properties. Putting physical and temporal distance from your trauma is beneficial. For example, cutting people out of your life.
Beyond that treatment becomes more tailored to the individual. For example, I developed medically diagnosed "severe anxiety" from my childhood. So part of my healing process is learning to calm my nervous system because my default mode is hyper-vigilance.
Every 15 minutes I get a notification on my phone reminding me to do two things:
1. Take a deep breath. This engages the parasympathetic nervous system and teaches me to self-soothe.
2. I ask myself "Who is hurting your right now?" and 95% of the time the answer is "nobody, everything is fine". This helps keep me grounded in the present moment.
Note that NONE of this involves divorcing myself from reality. In-fact, it's the opposite.
First of all, physical and temporal distance from trauma helps protect and heal from trauma.
Secondly, often trauma leaves people with a warped mental state that can be addressed on its own. For example, treating anxiety that was developed from trauma.
Thirdly, you can try to understand why your trauma occurred like “my dad beat me because his dad beat him”. Some might say this is part of forgiveness but imo there’s a big difference between understanding why someone did something and forgiving them.
It's specifically the injustice, rather than the hurt, that is keeps resentment alive. "It's not fair!" is the rallying cry. Hurt heals and lessens with time. But feelings can be nursed, indulged, prolonged, and inflamed.
Understanding operates on a different plane to emotions. Intellectually you can understand why something happened, but that doesn't necessarily have an effect on your emotions. Emotions seem to have a life of their own, if you don't take responsibility for them. And of course that's a key part of growing up, of maturity: emotional regulation.
You might use intellectual understanding as a rationale for regulating feelings of resentment, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient. You do need an act of will to let resentment go. And I think this is the core of forgiveness.
For instance, it's ineffective to forgive a spouse who continually beats you. It may allow you to paper over your emotions and have a semblance of peace. However it doesn't prevent the next attack or correct the damages. You need to get to the bottom of why this person thinks it's okay to beat you, or you need to get to a place where you'll be safe. Delusional forgiveness can get you killed in this situation.
So please do not advise people to deploy forgiveness without the three necessary conditions: cause, correction, and mitigation. Your advice may cause them to ignore options for active forgiveness that will genuinely increase their safety and prevent future harm
Example: Someone you care for has been raped, and feels the need to seek justice. You tell them how that will just cause them more pain and probably lead to no conviction, and offer them the idea that they can simply forgive the attacker and move on, as the more mature and healthy alternative.
In that case you have not given advocacy to the person you cared for. You have advocated on behalf of the rapist.
I'll reierate my thesis. Effective forgiveness has 3 material parts required to make emotional release safe and effective:
1. Modelling the cause of harm
2. Compensating the harm done
3. Mitigating future harm
Please do not advocate for forgiveness without advocating for these three components. Forgiveness without material changes creates further harm.
You're describing self protection. Which is an important set of skills for resilience and harm prevention, but has little to nothing to do with forgiveness. I'm afraid you're editorialising by creating a straw man rape victim argument. Just to be clear - although this is not the topic under discussion - I support rape victims attempts to obtain justice through the criminal justice system. And obviously agree that no one should stay in a situation where physical or sexual violence is threatened or likely.
To be clear I'm not advising people to allow themselves to continue to be harmed. I'm not engaging in prescriptive advice at all. Rather I'm describing the process of overcoming the pain of emotional (and sometimes physical) trauma.
Forgiveness is not about any of the above. It's about moving on (internally) from continual retraumatisation - after the source of trauma is no longer present. It's an internal emotional process for the most part. But one that cannot begin until the person engaging in it is physically and emotionally safe.
The Writing Cure (2002) https://books.google.com/books?id=3GeSRAAACAAJ
This is the most recent study I found by the main editor of that volume.
Randomised controlled trial of expressive writing and quality of life in men and women treated for colon or rectal cancer (2014) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08870446.2014.97...
This is the most recent review article I found.
Expressive writing interventions in cancer patients: a systematic review (2013) https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17437199.2014.88...
Using citation search in Google Scholar should get you more recent publications.
My point is, it definitely happens, but if it applies to _most_ PR comments I think the code review practices of your project may need improving. My experience has been that most code review comments are either seeking to impart or gain knowledge that the commenter genuinely finds useful.
Writing all that down made me more, not less, angry.
The trick is, when I'm feeling angry, I don't often want to answer. But when I do, it can help me realize that the current situation may also be hurting or frustrating the people who had been the targets of my anger, and then maybe we can work together to get rid of the problem. This seems to help me when calling customer service, because now I'm not fighting against them but fighting alongside of them.
Then one day later I requested to move my phone number to a different company.
Then they called me back telling me they could permanently lower my bills, and made me even more angry :)
I’m still happy I never paid them another cent, but in the back of my mind I know the company I moved on is doing more or less the same tricks.
I wonder how well it would work to have a placebo button that only shows on your own session
Writing an email and saving it as a draft gives me a memory of having sent the message. Occasionally I get asked about emails I've committed to sending, felt certain I already did, and subsequently found them saved as unsent drafts (inevitably because I got interrupted while I was writing).
The first time is data. Only the second is science. Exceptions can be made, but not for this one.
Also, just FYI, "Scientific Reports" is not in a specific subfield -- I have published on quantum computing in this journal. That is not too strange, there are plenty of "generalist" journals that are good, but I thought it could still be useful context to know.
The kind of result that makes careers: seemingly elegant and simple study design, common sense hypothesis and overall great marketability.
Diederik Stapel was one of the largest science fraudster in history and this kind of stuff was his bread and butter. More recently Francesca Gino was caught falsifying the data of the "honesty pledge at the top of form" that is highly similar in concept to this.
Now for the career-ending question: Will it replicate?
So you write your angry letter, burn it, then do what needs to be done, free from angry.
It could be from a place of empathy: I wish you to be happy, but I wish you to be happy very far away from me.
Or from a more selfish perspective, you simply want to know you did the best you could so that you don’t need to have any guilt on it.
This attitude is a problem in our society. Anger ends up being destructive because we think we have to suppress it or neutralize it. This just increases its strength over time until it explodes out violently. I doubt the strategy in the paper is any more than a temporary suppression of the emotion.
We need to recognize that anger is a valid emotion just like any other. Anger becomes dangerous because we demonize it without trying to understand it, which just gives it strength in the long run.
Now there is an opportunity for you two to work through the issue, and the partner has to feel some of the emotional impact of their behavior, preventing them from dismissing it.
If that issue remained unaddressed, you might deal with the stress by reducing your view of your partner as a capable thoughtful individual, which is a much harder situation to address than a difficult emotional conversation.
And it's not just anger. If I want to express verbal affection towards someone and they don't want to hear it, we often call it abuse. But if they want me to suppress verbal affection towards them and I don't want to, we celebrate it as them having boundaries.
And I think sometimes being forced to not say something can hurt as much as being forced to hear something, yet we don't seem to see how it harms people.
But you can also process anger solo with the right tools, or with a good therapist that doesn't shame anger. It doesn't always have to involve another person.
Aside from academic interest, I struggle to see the practical benefit of this study. When I'm angry, in the heat of the moment, there's no way I'm going to stop and write an essay about my feelings. By the time I am in a frame of mind to do so, the anger has passed and not a problem anymore.
Dunno.
One are going to end up in alot of avoidable verbal and physical fights if ones anger is not suppressed.
Just such a simple thing as the comment answer timer on HN helps alot.
I think it's not only ok to verbally fight but helps us resolve conflict instead of avoid it.
And I think if we can resolve it at the verbal level it doesn't have to become physical.
But I think the cultural suppression of fighting/conflict is even deeper than the suppression of anger. A friend just asked for our definitions of peace and I said I currently believe it's a mythical concept where conflict doesn't exist.
Anger normally points out a boundary that’s being breached in which valuable things to a self - like autonomy, comfort, connection - are compromised. That we have so many angry people and that our culture encourages anger management rather than anger processing points to its rejection writ large
Anger can tell people that we want them to stop doing an activity and sometimes people don't even know their behavior is breaching those boundaries. One time an ex visited me in a park. I juggled the soccer ball then kicked it to her. She rolled it back and said she didn't want to play. I juggled it for 15 more minutes and then kicked it to her again. She stood up and kicked it with me for like 5 minutes.
Three weeks later, she got angry and said "And you don't respect my boundaries!" And I was really confused. She said, "I TOLD you I didn't want to kick the ball and you still kicked it to me."
I wished she had expressed more anger when I kicked it the second time. I wasn't trying to make her angry. Kicking the ball with her wasn't that important to me. I just didn't know that it bothered her that much and if I did, I immediately would have stopped.
Now, based on my experience dealing with such situations around me, some people have difficulties considering they should even talk to a therapist. They will violently reject the very idea they might have a problem, and will keep hurting people around them. Controlling anger allows having a discussion in the first place, which then can turn into the understanding you’re talking about.
So for me, I feel confident to process and accept them by myself, it's when I communicate them with others it can bring lots of conflict, and yet, if I only express them to myself and not to others, they don't often achieve their function of communication, which I think may be one of the core functions of emotions.
The more you resist the anger the more it will persist.
Acknowledge your anger, yes. Then acknowledge your control, not only over how you express it, but even over whether you feel angry or not. It is possible to develop the skill to stop being angry. This is far more important than going with the flow.
It's often a bitter pill to swallow, because it means the people that act out of anger, or are always angry, are ultimately responsible for how they feel. It is not someone else's fault you feel angry.
Often that amounts to changing the people or circumstances in one’s life. That’s the point of therapy. A good therapist wouldn’t help a sexually abused child stay in a bad situation and just learn to suppress emotion. Well maybe a cbt therapist would. But a good therapist would try to help catalyze a change in the situation causing the trauma.
An equally valid narrative is that, especially in our society where most people have repressed anger, once anger is tapped into, there’s an overwhelm of backlogged emotion that is also released. Anger as an emotion is energetically expensive for a biological system, and it doesn’t make any sense that it would continue to be reinforced indefinitely.
The path forward is to understand the anger with compassion, and the trauma or painful emotions below it, or the boundaries that are being crossed. Rather than just trying to force yourself not to feel it.
It's not that different from telling a depressed person that they should just think positively to cure themselves.
I think you’re appealing to the boiled down and stripped away “mindfulness” movement in the west that focuses on creating what I call “Vipassana Zombies” - people who can feel their sensations just enough to recognize and ignore them. A lot of Buddhist teachings are about empowerment and action, and they’ve been grossly misunderstood.
"You will find peace in action. Join an eco-guerilla cell. Use your rage to guide your contribution to the cause - it is a valid emotion driven by a need for change. Long live the revolution! For Victory! For Justice! For Peace!"
So I think the broader picture is not just grief, but feelings, especially intense feelings. If I feel sad, I want to cry, not work. If I feel tired, I want to sleep, not work. If I fall in love, I want to be with that person, not work. I think many if not most feelings can get in the way of our maximum productivity states. Maybe low level anger and focus, with a little bit of playfulness, can keep us productive, but stray too far outside of that and we don't look as productive.
I would argue, however, that we might be more productive in the long-term, because otherwise we may burn out, communicate less effectively, and become more desensitized to what people need and want, both from consumers and fellow producers.
Need to clarify which society is meant by "our".
The authors of this paper are Japanese, and the participants are local university students. I would assume suppression of anger is the norm for most people involved in this study, since Japanese culture generally aims to preserve harmony.
This is in contrast with some cultures that are more direct in their communications and perhaps not suppressing much at all. It's possible that they would see different results when the experiment is done with a more diverse group of participants.
As per the article - [..] can sometimes lead to [..]. I don't know how clearer the article can be, there is no proposed "solution" here that solves everything in every scenario. Its simply testing a hypothesis.
You send it an email. It prints it out, dumps the printout into a dumpster, and burns it in the dumpster.
I don't know if it's still online though...
"Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it; that is often an excellent way of sterilizing the seeds which the Enemy plants in a human soul..." - Screwtape
Hah, the down voters probably feel the same way about writers