Everybody Gets Mad, but Women May Be Better at Cooling Off

Modern psychology holds that women are the more emotional of the sexes, experiencing deeper and more frequent feelings of sadness, depression and happiness. Anger is the exception. Call it the manly emotion, a feeling women don’t report experiencing more intensely than men. Men, research suggests, are quicker to anger and more likely to stay mad than women.

New research may offer some clues about such sex differences, according to studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and conducted by State University of New York at Buffalo psychologist Cheryl L. Rusting and University of Michigan psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema.

In a series of lab experiments, 111 men and 145 women undergraduates were asked to relive a time when they were so angry they felt they would “explode.” Subjects who dwelled on their anger got madder while those who distracted themselves cooled off.

The study found that the women were better at cooling off.

Furthermore, cooling off is healthy. “Focusing on anger does not have the positive effects we think it does,” says Nolen-Hoeksema. “We found that people in lab studies and in studies in the real world who ruminate about negative feelings such as anger, depression, and anxiety mixed with depression stay that way and get worse.”

In another experiment, the researchers induced anger with guided imagery about a teacher’s assistant that is every undergrad’s nightmare: The T.A. scoffs at your comments, gives a C-minus on a paper you think is the best you’ve ever done, then circulates it in the class as an example of how not to do a paper. Even though the name is blacked out, everyone stares.

Study subjects were given a choice of how to deal with their anger. Men were more likely to stew.

“Women were much more likely to distract themselves from angry moods than men,” says Nolen-Hoeksema. In the same way, “men tend to avoid focusing on sad moods by doing distracting things like going jogging or focusing on work.”

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The different ways men and women deal with anger and depression may be a result of socialization, the researchers speculate. “Women as children are given messages that it is OK to be sad but not OK to be angry,” says Nolen-Hoeksema. “Men in contrast are given the opposite message. This probably results in adopting differing coping strategies.”

Distracting oneself from dark emotions is not tantamount to solving the problems underlying them. The avoidance of angry feelings “is one of the reasons why women get depressed so much,” says Nolen-Hoeksema. And a tendency by men to marinate in their own anger and to relive an injustice over and over again may account for why some men are overcome by angry feelings and act violently or impulsively. The key to dealing with anger and depression is constructive thinking about a problem, but the proper state of mind is crucial.

“We also found that people who ruminate, even when trying to problem solve, don’t do a good job,” says Nolen-Hoeksema. “Rumination heightens helpless feelings so you are more likely to find poor solutions. In our depression studies, we asked about hypothetical problems like ‘a friend seems to be avoiding you.’ Depressed people who ruminated said things like ‘I don’t know if I could deal with it.’ And ‘I would probably just give up.’ We contrasted this with people who were equally depressed whom we distracted with something in the lab. They did much better problem solving.”

It is not completely clear why women and men cope differently with anger and depression. But social psychologists like Nolen-Hoeksema and Rusting have little doubt that gender role-playing as well as the different ways in which parents talk to girls and boys is partly responsible.

“Some literature on emotions shows that parents talk differently to their children about anger,” says Rusting. “They talk more frequently and in greater detail about anxiety and sadness with girls and they talk more about anger with boys. They also tend to find anger or aggressive expressions more acceptable in boys. With girls, there is a tendency to say it is not ladylike behavior.”