Mad About You : Anger, when managed, can add spice to your relationship. Left unchecked, it can tear the two of you apart. The trick is to keep your cool when things get hot.
A little anger directed your way from your spouse may not be fun, “but it is functional in a marriage, and that gets it out in the open,” says psychologist John Gottman.
A leading researcher in identifying predictors of successful marriages, Gottman has started the Anger Project at the University of Washington to investigate the functional and dysfunctional forms of getting hot under the collar.
He reports that the latest scientific evidence on anger supports what many therapists are finding out there in the trenches of marital discord: that expressing anger in the right ways is good for a marriage, while expressing it inappropriately can be the death knell of a relationship.
By noting voice tone, expressions and nonverbal behavior of his research subjects, Gottman has separated what he calls “pure anger”--when people who are upset say so and attempt to talk it out--from other forms of anger, including belligerence, provocation, domination and defensive expressions.
“It turns out that pure anger is not harmful,” says the author of “Why Marriages Succeed or Fail” (Simon & Schuster). “It functions like putting your words in italics. It gets people’s attention. We have a little bit of evidence that it actually is good in a marriage. But these other forms of anger expression--the belligerent and defensive forms--are very dysfunctional and are predictive of divorce.”
Other studies have reached similar conclusions. University of Wisconsin researchers who have been measuring brain activity associated with different emotions have found that fear and sadness show activity on the right frontal lobe of the brain. The brain’s left hemisphere lights up meters when subjects are happy, amused or interested. “That also is true for anger,” Gottman says. “It’s on the left with other positive emotions.”
Studies at the University of Alabama demonstrate that women tend to cool down and relax after experiencing anger, whereas men tend to stay angry. “Men are more likely to have distress-maintaining thoughts (righteous indignation or feeling like an innocent victim blended with sadness and disappointment) than women,” Gottman says. “They keep thinking about things, which makes retaliation more likely.”
At Catholic University in Washington, D.C., psychology professor Clifford Notarius, who has been studying happy and unhappy couples for 20 years, finds that anger that is not dealt with constructively “is the signature of a distressed relationship.”
That destructive anger, he explains, often is fueled by “a series of hot thoughts” that serve as explanations for the disappointment or injury felt.
The trick to defusing an explosive situation, says the co-author of “We Can Work It Out” (Putnam), is to make those explanations specific and operable to the moment. When your partner is 45 minutes late for your anniversary dinner, for instance, thinking, “He’s probably caught in a terrible traffic jam,” is much less agitating than, “He never watches the time,” or, “He’s always putting other people before me,” or, “He’s an inconsiderate jerk.”
Says Notarius: “Those kinds of thoughts will have important implications (as to) what happens when your partner arrives.”
In his research, Gottman has been measuring another indicator that may provide some clues to when anger crosses the line of effectiveness. “If your heart rate is over 100 beats a minute, you can’t really listen very well,” he says. “And not only can’t you take in information very well, but you tend to rely on older learned behaviors”--namely the dysfunctional run-or-attack forms.
“The heart betrays the mind at that point,” Gottman says, explaining that just as in physical exercise, where there’s an optimum range for heart rate, the same is true when exercising one’s anger. Assuming that in a fit of rage you have the wherewithal to check your pulse, “keep it below 95 beats per minute.”
