Women and Anger: To Vent or Not to Vent Isn't the Question
JANE E. BRODY To women who were taught that it is unladylike to express anger, the presumably therapeutic yelling and cursing of the current let-it-all-hang-out generation is often shocking. But now a major new study has strongly suggested that both the old style of keeping anger in and the newer tendency to release it explosively are equally poor ways of expressing this fundamental human emotion. Both responses can catch women in a vicious cycle of low self-esteem and depression and can worsen anger because the issues that provoke it are never resolved, the study findings indicate. Far more effective, the researchers found, is to calm anger through physical or mental activities and to discuss angry feelings, preferably with the person who touched them off. The study involved 14 researchers and 535 women from 25 to 66 years old, most of them white married mothers who work full time outside the home. The women, who chose to participate, were recruited from work sites, educational...