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By Root 964 0

often quiet, shy, and withdrawn. They are often reluctant to talk about their troubles. With our Freudian-oriented prodding, we got them to talk, and talk, and talk. They began to complain. They remembered how bad life was. They wallowed. Encouraged, they dredged up more and more tragic material. They wept. Not infrequently, they would unravel, and then we had a great deal of trouble getting them together again. What might have started as an ordinary case of mild depression sometimes escalated into a severe case—with a suicide attempt thrown in.

Put another way, there is simply no evidence that depression is anger turned inward. Getting the anger out of depressives, who are often well defended against many of the bad things that have happened to them, sometimes worsens depression. Contrary to the Freudian theory, when you measure anger during depression, hostility increases during the depression and continues after the depression is gone.10

So I conclude that venting your anger is not good for your health. It has no clear relation to cancer, it may increase—rather than decrease—your risk for coronary heart disease, and it can exacerbate depression.

Anger: honest? just? effective? We deem it honest to tell the object of our anger just what we think. This is, after all, the truth, and we should tell the truth. But there is a difference between honesty and truth. Anger, specifically, and emotion, generally, color evidence. This may be one of emotion’s reasons for existing. By biasing the evidence, emotion readies us to act in certain ways that may be highly adaptive when we are in the right niche. Emotion places colored lenses on the spectacles through which we usually view the world. Anxiety makes the world look more frightening than it is; fear lowers our threshold for seeing danger, and makes us more apt to flee. When we are watching a horror movie on the VCR, a real cat leaping from behind a desk momentarily terrifies us.

Depression colors the world, too, and so gets us to give up, turn inward, and sit in our cave conserving our energy until happier times materialize. To a depressed person, the world often seems bleaker than it actually is (one of the most objectionable aspects of the latest best-selling suicide manual is that it fails to recognize that wanting to kill yourself may be based on a temporary distortion of the evidence, not on rational evaluation). Anger readies us to attack—innocent actions seen through its lens appear to be trespass. Our perceptual threshold for affront lowers. When a clumsy fifth-grader accidentally drops his lunch tray on a bully, the bully interprets the action as aggressive and intentional. This “hostile-attribution bias” characterizes the way aggressive boys think all the time, and the way normal people think when they are angry.11

So while it may be honest to be angry, it is not truthful. The judgments we make when we are angry are often far off the mark, coloring evidence in a hostile and threatening manner.

The same can be said for justice. Anger moves us toward justice—as we see it. Anger is not an emotion that helps us see things from our attacker’s point of view. Rather, it imposes a protective, self-interested lens of trespass on the world. Sometimes it is correct, and it punishes the trespasser most fittingly. Other times it wreaks revenge on innocent people or demands overly severe punishment for minor transgressions. When in the heat of anger you make the mistake of punishing a small child severely, you may create excessive damage. An accurate description of the moral tone of red-hot anger is “self-righteous” rather than “righteous.”

Finally, the effectiveness of anger is not all it is cracked up to be. Certainly, in a desperate, back-against-the-wall, physical fight on our own territory, anger gives us the strength of many. But we are almost never in that situation. A rival insults us. A co-worker slights our efforts. Our spouse flirts with another man. Our two-year-old disobeys us. A voyeur peeks at us. How effective is an outburst of temper in these situations?

Anger