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Tag: MindBodyGreen

2019 Wellbeing

Why We Need To Rethink The Way We Talk About Anger

8 min read

May 13, 2019 at 11:37PM Anger can be a beautiful thing. Continue Reading… 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 research, 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. A new study published in the Journal of Adolescent Research sought to understand the ways in which people talk about and conceptualize anger. They asked 101 cisgender teens to describe a recent experience they’d had with anger (using their own definition of the word) and to complete questionnaires about their self-esteem and anxiety levels. The researchers chose to use teenagers for their study because adults tend to have a lot more anger regulation. Do girls and boys experience anger differently? 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

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