17 ms·
Anger is eliminated with the disposal of a paper written because of provocation
- fylham 3y agoCool result! But does it replicate?
- fwip 3y agoWell, it was published today, so you'll have to wait a little while to find out.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- samatman 3y agoThe replication crisis won't be over until everyone who matters observes a social obligation to treat any unreplicated paper as interesting fiction. The first time is data. Only the second is science. Exceptions can be made, but not for this one.
- krastanov 3y agoIt was published in "Scientific Reports", a known low-quality journal. They are not necessary predatory like some of the truly bad journals, e.g., work in this journal still is supposed to pass the "not a low effort triviality and not obviously wrong" check and there are even some really cool things published in this journal. However, I generally take publications in this journal with a significant grain of salt. 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.
- lebean 3y agoIt's totally legit. They made the participants sign an honesty pledge before answering the questionnaire!
- BeetleB 3y agoNo doubt, with pictures of trusted, respected authority figures on the walls in the room they were present in.
- canadiantim 3y agoGive it a try yourself and let us know
- dr_kretyn 3y agoWell, it's been hand wavily described on 50 students with similar socio-economical backgrounds how much more replication would you like? There are also some references to statistics terms so it must have statistical power.
- Fin_Code 3y agoI think this has more to do with putting your thoughts in order but an interesting result.
- junlegi 3y agoOne of my favorite songs by one of my favorite artists is about this phenomenon. Inflammatory writ by Joanna Newsom. And as for my inflammatory writ? Well, I wrote it and I was not inflamed one bit https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DWsJDdyDK8M https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DWsJDdyDK8M
- alcide 3y agoYou made my entire week. Years ago, I stumbled on a song of theirs and could never find it again. After recognizing the voice, I went through the catalogue and there it was: Peach, Plum, Pear. Thank you!
- junlegi 3y agoThat makes mine! 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. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cV6-aJlswCs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cV6-aJlswCs
- yosito 3y agoI suppose this method has its limits, but it is interesting to study ways that anger can be eliminated. I wonder if there are techniques for illuminating anger due to significantly injurious behavior.
- javier_e06 3y agoOn writing your feelings. 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.
- blastro 3y agoYes, forgiveness is really for the offended, not the offender. It can be a heavy weight to carry.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 3y agoDoesn't the offender carry a heavy weight anymore?
- blastro 3y agoThere's no way for you to know
- javier_e06 3y agoThe Jewish folk have the day of atonement Yom Kippur (Day of atonement). The day to ask for forgiveness and forgive others. I believe Henny Youngman, one-liner comedian said: "Yesterday was Yom Kippur, I went a bought a Mercedes" ;)
- CooCooCaCha 3y agoI get confused by the way people use the word "forgiveness". 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.
- growingkittens 3y agoI have always found analog writing to be a powerful cognitive 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.
- BeetleB 3y agoThe study found that merely writing it on paper was insufficient, though. The point of the study is crumpling it up and throwing it is superior.
- growingkittens 3y agoThe study looked at keeping a paper around (underlying situation: a reminder active in a workspace) vs. throwing it away (underlying situation: removing a constant reminder). They didn't study anything in-between, such as removing the reminder without throwing it away.
- malfist 3y agoYeah, to your point, I'm curious how writing about frustrations/anger in a journal that you never revisit would compare to their treatment. It seems to help me.
- dotancohen 3y agoWould you mind telling more about your journaling? If you would prefer in private, my Gmail username is the same as my HN username. Thank you!
- wrp 3y agoThis seems related to a much-replicated result from the practice of "expressive writing," also referred to informally as the "writing cure." Broadly, you feel better about things after having written about them. Remarkably, even physical ailments seem to be affected.
- dotancohen 3y agoPhysical ailments? What keywords should I be googling to read more about this? I'm not finding anything.
- wrp 3y agoThis is a collection of good quality articles. As I recall, there was one paper about physical ailments. The Writing Cure (2002) https://books.google.com/books?id=3GeSRAAACAAJ 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/10.1080/08870446.2014.971798 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/10.1080/17437199.2014.882007 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17437199.2014.88... Using citation search in Google Scholar should get you more recent publications.
- dotancohen 3y agoThank you.
- Trasmatta 3y ago> Anger suppression is important in our daily life, as its failure can sometimes lead to the breaking down of relationships in families. Thus, effective strategies to suppress or neutralise anger have been examined 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.
- webstrand 3y agoOften it is simply impossible to do anything constructive with anger. So techniques like the one in the article are useful, it's not a dismissal of anger as a valid emotion. The goal is to reduce redirected aggression.
- Trasmatta 3y agoAnger becomes unproductive because we shame it and suppress it over and over and over. If we knew how to express anger in a healthy way, we wouldn't need to do that (with the exception of edge cases, like a physical hormonal imbalance)
- nprateem 3y agoI've been doing this for years. It's a twist on writing a letter you never send. Scribbling it out or chucking it away is an obvious next step.
- CodeWriter23 3y agoSo many comments here focused on the writing component. So few on the letting go component.
- mzs 3y agoYup, I do this thing where I imagine myself writing down the thought, but not actually the contents of what I am writing, and then throw it in the bin, and here I actually perform the action. It's a little hard to do the throwing away motion when others are around, but I can discreetly move my hand. For whatever reason this work very well for me.
- rcthompson 3y agoIt's an interesting idea, but they really made that title as unparseable as they possibly could.
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoJust throw it away? This looks like much more fun: https://signalvnoise.com/svn3/the-making-of-a-dumpster-fire/ https://signalvnoise.com/svn3/the-making-of-a-dumpster-fire/ 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...
- kiechu 3y agoI often write an angry comment just to not send it.
- pierrebai 3y agoI suppose it may also apply to voodoo dolls. Make an effigy, put pins in it, burn it for emotional release.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoBut what if voodoo actually works!
- csours 3y agoI'll sometimes write a post or comment and then delete it. It's probably not as good as writing on paper, but it helps. I wonder how well it would work to have a placebo button that only shows on your own session
- EvanAnderson 3y agoI do this, both purposefully (on HN) and, in a manner, inadvertently. 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).
- drpossum 3y agoFine, but when I delete PR comments about my code that upset me it just makes my coworkers mad.
- theonething 3y agoAm I the only to think that most PR comments are just people bike shedding to make themselves seem useful in code review?
- WizardClickBoy 3y agoI not infrequently find myself prefixing my own code review comments with some variant of "I'm mostly asking this to make myself sound smart, but..." and then usually (not always) I delete the comment. But it's not a high proportion of my total review output, assuming I'm impartial enough to tell the difference. 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.
- debacle 3y agoMost modern anger is derived from helplessness. I don't get angry when I spill my coffee or someone cuts me off on my commute, but I recently discovered that I've been overcharged for my cell phone plan for the last 18 months and it made me seethe, mostly because I know that it's going to take a half dozen phone calls over at least as many hours to come to any real resolution, and that millions of people are likely in the same predicament. Writing all that down made me more, not less, angry.
- fwip 3y agoWell, the study does say that you've got to shred it to reduce the anger levels.
- jimkleiber 3y agoAn exercise (whether writing or verbal) that helps me redirect or alleviate some of the anger is to simply ask "How do I imagine that person might be feeling?" 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.
- fragmede 3y agoAnger is only a problem when it shortcircuits logic and reason and makes you behave irrationally and in ways you later regret. But used effectively, it can give you the energy you need to get through all 18 of those really frustrating phone calls before you give up.
- jwrallie 3y agoIt happened to me, I called and talked for an hour and managed to get my money back. I finally got the person on the other side of the phone to agree to “discuss with my superior” after asking them to describe what the word theft means and explain me that adding a service without my request and charging me for a year did not fit in the description. 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.
- ChainOfFools 3y ago"The great thing is to prevent his doing anything. As long as he does not convert it [his purpose] into action [...]" "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
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 3y ago> Let him, if he has any bent that way, write a book about it Hah, the down voters probably feel the same way about writers
- office_drone 3y agoThat's a great use of inversion - the mental model detailed by Farnham Street (https://fs.blog/inversion/ https://fs.blog/inversion/)
- Y_Y 3y agoContrary to the poorly-written title, the subjects did not write a whole academic paper about the provocation.
- anigbrowl 3y agoAre you sure? Maybe this is it
- peterfirefly 3y agoWill it replicate? I somehow doubt it.
- throwaway74432 3y agoIt doesn't appear that they separated those who believe it would work from those who didn't, to see if there was a placebo effect. That would have been useful.
- A_D_E_P_T 3y agoThough not mentioned in the paper, Lincoln was famously aware of this technique. > "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-art-of-the-unsent-angry-letter.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/opinion/sunday/the-lost-a...
- lIl-IIIl 3y agoAccording to the paper setting the letter aside did not subdue anger in the participants. The anger subsided in those who threw it away or shredded it.
- midnightmonster 3y ago...did not subdue anger in the participants _as much as throwing it away did_. Just writing it down and filing it also seemed to help, just not as much.
- Stephen_0xFF 3y agoAbe wrote ‘Never sent. Never signed’ which might’ve helped.
- wesleychen 3y agoIt sounds like he retained the paper rather than disposing it.
- red-iron-pine 3y agowhen you're a public figure notes like this are a CYA
- porompompero 3y agoDoing it for decades. It works better if you burn the letter. I even jump over the fire. No joke.
- tommiegannert 3y agoHave you considered flash paper? It would be difficult to jump over it in time, so just wondering... :)
- porompompero 3y agoWell burning letters is a difficult thing, because often there is not a suitable place for it.
- dotancohen 3y agoIf you are serious, I would love to ask you something that could possibly help me. My Gmail username is the same as my HN username if you don't mind.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- porompompero 3y agoIf you are serious, check the mailbox for messages at your site :)
- dotancohen 3y agoThank you, I answered you back in email.
- psunavy03 3y ago"Dost thou think in a moment of anger, '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
- huitzitziltzin 3y agoI thought this kind of small-sample, theory-free, tell-any-story-you-want statistical significance mining exercise was out of style! This study is like an unwelcome blast from the 2010's or earlier!
- taylorius 3y agoI wonder if that technique could apply more broadly. 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?
- nxobject 3y agoAnecdotally, whenever I keep a journal through difficult times, my handwriting's so bad that I can't read it after a while, and the journal ends up being "write-only" as well. I wonder whether the ripping-it-up would be more cathartic.
- puppable 3y agoI've had times where I've written those sorts of thoughts on a small sheet of notepad paper, which I would then tear out and burn in the kitchen sink. More frequently, I'll just write what I'm thinking into an empty, personal use chat window in lieu of venting to others. In either case, I think they definitely have some effect.
- DFHippie 3y agoI wish my son had tried this.
- taylorius 3y agoIt sounds like something bad happened with your son. I'm very sorry to hear it if that's the case - if you want to say more, please feel free.
- DFHippie 3y agoThanks. My son committed suicide a bit over a year ago. I was in the room next to him. He did it very quietly. I was the one who found his body. Or our cat was. She kept trying to get into his room. I finally sought to help her and found him. 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.
- CraftingLinks 3y agoI do that with reactionary tweets. I either delete them before posting, or sometimes shortly after. It definitely works.
- fny 3y agoIs there a reason why so many studies (this included) fail to report the effect size? The way "significant" is used in literature, readers (even the educated ones) interpret the research as suggesting some groundbreaking result. 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.
- aftoprokrustes 3y agoIn my experience (10 years in academia), people who understand statistics enough do look at effect size rather than significance levels. But unfortunately, even in one of the top european universities, a lot of researchers (who are ~70% PhD candidates with only basic stats training) tend to misinterpret significance as meaning "large effect". 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.
- SerpentJoe 3y agoThere are at least two reasonable readings of "anger is eliminated", with one being true if anger is reduced at all, and both being true if anger is reduced to zero.
- Lerc 3y agoI think the reason is rather simple. Funding. 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.
- d--b 3y agoI think this kind of tricks definitely work the first time. But my gut feeling is that if you do it several times the effect decreases as the mental image of throwing the thing in the bin becomes more familiar.
- porompompero 3y agoRight the opposite. Try.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tudorw 3y agoilinx
- ketanmaheshwari 3y agoHaven't read the paper but it reminds me of a popular scene in a Bollywood movie where the leading lady tells her acquaintance to physically burn the picture of his ex and flush it down the toilet. To which the guy says it is silly but still does it on insistence from the lady. After the act, he says he actually felt better doing what felt silly at first!
- progrus 3y agoAlso works with the drafts folder
- rlue 3y agoHas no one noticed that there seems to be no control group in this study? Every participant wrote a statement that got torn to shreds; every participant had to write their emotions about it. 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).
- galleywest200 3y agoBased on the graphs presented in this study, it seems not everyone had one shredded or destroyed. Some had the letters retained.
- rlue 3y agoThat was a figure of speech meaning “to receive very harsh criticism”.
- resource_waste 3y agoOuch, Nature publishing pop science. A few years ago my PhD/Academia Engineer path cousin validated if a study was 'real' by simply looking at the word Nature. 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.
- azinman2 3y agoThere’s no reason to throw away authority. Should something be not questioned because it was published in Nature? No, of course not. But should it be given the benefit of doubt? For sure. It’s extremely difficult to publish in nature, with a super rigorous process behind it. Peoples careers are made by publishing in such a journal, and extremely few are so lucky. 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.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]
- gillesjacobs 3y agoAlways beware these type of Social Science studies that make for great popsci headlines. 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?
- err4nt 3y agoIn ancient history these are known as 'execration texts' and we have examples from Egypt going back as far as 4600 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execration_texts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execration_texts
- robinduckett 3y agon = 57 people
- ararar 3y agoWhat if this is the basis of "magic"? The secret power of curses that were burnt or cast into a lake or cave that "worked" by diminishing the anger in the caster rather than cursing the target.
- dogweather 3y agoNo control group; that's too bad.
- boppo1 3y agoI have found that some of the things people did that made me angry were very wrong and I should not have forgiven them, I should have moved on with my life in directions that minimized my exposure to them (as opposed to bending over backward to maintain a friendship.) How does one apply the letter method without becoming a doormat?
- jwrallie 3y agoManaging your anger does not mean forgiving or not taking action, it just means you have freedom to do it so on a rational basis rather than emotional. 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.
- tamimio 3y agoI don’t know about that, I personally suppressed my anger with some individuals and they took it as a sign of weakness, looking back, I don’t regret it, despite setting boundaries, I feel like sometimes and with certain type of people, you should show them some anger as a deterrent.
- placebo 3y agoWhile I agree that people who take goodwill as a sign of weakness should be deterred, I think that anger as a means to achieve that is a double-edged sword. Perhaps a good method is to use the paper trick and dispose of the anger after it has served its purpose ...
- vlark 3y agoSo much social media drama would subside if people wrote their hot takes but never posted them.