Research & Discovery
Anger mismanagement
A VCU researcher finds that when it comes to quelling rage, many use a sledgehammer when a mantra would do
“Rage rooms” have proliferated over the past 15 years or so, exploding like so many shards of dishware flung at a wall. Often they’re billed as places to sink anger into a bat or a crowbar and swing it at electronics, automobiles, assorted household breakables and, sometimes, effigies of political candidates.
Sophie Kjærvik, Ph.D., saw an opportunity to assault, instead, the rationale itself — the idea that one can pummel their way to emotional relief.
“Catharsis is an idea that’s very common in society and it’s never been shown to work in research — but everyone thinks it works,” says Kjærvik, a postdoctoral researcher in VCU Health’s Injury and Violence Prevention Program. “You pay to smash objects to get your anger out, which is so counterintuitive to everything I know … I wanted to debunk that myth.”
The shortcomings of the catharsis theory had already been shown in studies, including those by Kjærvik’s doctoral adviser, Ohio State University communications professor Brad J. Bushman, Ph.D. But it hadn’t been fully tested in a meta-analysis, a type of research that pools the findings of many studies to see what insights the aggregate holds. These wider analyses, Kjærvik says, so far had only focused on psychotherapeutic tools for defusing anger, like cognitive behavioral therapy, or on sports among kids and teens.
In research published this year in Clinical Psychology Review, Kjærvik (pronounced SCHAR-vick) and Bushman reviewed results from 154 studies and found that punching or kicking an object appeared to neither reduce nor inflame anger.
At best, Kjærvik says, angry people in rage rooms are just breaking stuff (possibly things that others could use). At worst, they’re tuning their brains for aggression.
“By punching objects … or yelling into a pillow, or just jumping up and down and screaming, you’re actually practicing doing that in the future when you get angry,” she says.
Other physical activities, including walking, martial arts, weight training and swimming, appeared to be similarly ineffective against anger. But Kjærvik and Bushman also found a few outliers: Ball sports, aerobic exercise and physical education classes all had a “slight positive effect” in reducing anger, Kjærvik says, possibly because they tend to be social activities. Jogging, on the other hand, wasn’t just ineffective for counteracting anger — it made people angrier. (Why, though, wasn’t clear from the available data. So, Kjærvik says, going for a jog remains “really good for your heart — just don’t do it when you’re angry.”)
Activities that lowered anger and aggression were those aimed at calming the body, like meditation and slow-flow yoga, a finding that’s consistent with previous meta-analyses. Kjærvik and Bushman found those activities worked regardless of gender, age, race, culture, student status, criminal history and intellectual ability. They worked when delivered digitally or in-person, in groups or individually, in the lab or in the field. And when one of those activities included a cognitive component like mindfulness, all the better.
Sophie Kjærvik, Ph.D. “Catharsis is an idea that’s very common in society and it’s never been shown to work in research — but everyone thinks it works.” — Photo by Jud Froelich (M.S.’21)
This type of research, capable of seeing patterns in a patchwork of data and methodologies, “plays a crucial role in our field,” says Nicholas Thomson, Ph.D., research director for the Injury and Violence Prevention Program and an associate professor of psychiatry, psychology and surgery at VCU. Studies like Kjærvik’s “refine our understanding of the physiological pathways through which emotions like anger can be managed,” he says. And, in this case, it shows the efficacy of freely available, nonclinical ways to defuse anger and aggression.
The study is part of a broader research focus for Kjærvik, whose work aims to better understand why some people react more aggressively than others and how that response could be tamed.
“Aggressive behavior is destructive,” she says. “It’s the evil and dark side of human beings. It’s socially destructive, it’s destructive for your career, it’s destructive for everything — but we still do it. Why?”
Threads of that interest were formed as a child in her native Norway.
Kjærvik says she was raised “in a somewhat aggressive household.” And she was a teenager in 2011 when a domestic terrorist, angered over growing multiculturalism, turned a summer afternoon into her country’s deadliest day since World War II. Anders Behring Breivik set off a bomb in downtown Oslo, not far from Kjærvik’s high school, and immediately afterward, dressed as a police officer, went on a shooting rampage at a center-left political group’s youth camp on the nearby island of Utøya. Seventy-seven people were killed in all, most of them teenagers, including two acquaintances of Kjærvik’s.
She studied psychology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, particularly curious about the links between aggression and personality traits and disorders. In 2018, while pursuing a master’s degree at the University of Oslo, Kjærvik traveled to Ohio State for a class on meta-analysis taught by Bushman, a nationally recognized figure in the study of violence.
There, she realized she wanted to return to the U.S. for a doctoral degree and that her future was in research. “I just felt this huge draw toward it. I really wanted to be a part of an environment where you would talk about research and methods and theories as if it was an everyday conversation.”
So far, Kjærvik’s work has plumbed the risk factors for aggression and violence that might be posed by mental health conditions like narcissism, antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy, as well as by attitudes about guns.
She was part of a research team that showed women who committed violent crimes with guns were more prone to prison violence than violent offenders who hadn’t used guns. And in 2023, she and Bushman published results from a clinical trial of kids ages 8-12 who watched a short gun-safety video or a car-safety video at home and then about a week later were left to play in a lab with hidden disabled handguns. The kids who watched the gun-safety video were more likely to tell an adult that they found a gun, less likely to touch it and less likely to pull the trigger.
In that study, they found that simply being male was a risk factor for gun violence. But so was an interest in guns and watching violent movies, risk factors that might be easy enough to dampen if people are aware of them — a scientific undertaking similar to showing that meditation is better for anger than beating the stuffing out of a VCR.
Kjærvik is now working on a study that puts another aspect of everyday aggression under the meta-analytic microscope: retaliation. She’s looking into whether it offers any meaningful emotional release or other positive effect.
The results aren’t in, but she does have a hypothesis. And if it holds, now might be the time for one last diabolical plot — or to just go ahead and take up meditation — before the science comes in.
