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‘Self-distancing’ effective at reducing anger in the moment

Provoked students who “self-distanced” — or reflected upon a provocation from a distance — had fewer aggressive thoughts and angry feelings and displayed less aggressive behavior, according to study results.

“We argue that it is not enough that patients analyze their emotions, as it is common clinical practice, but that they need to do this from a detached — or, for example, self-distanced — perspective,” study researcher Dominik Mischkowski, a graduate student at Ohio State University, told Healio.com. “Only then are they likely to reap the benefits of working through emotions. A less detached analysis is likely to result in rumination and to backfire.

Mischkowski, along with colleagues Ethan Kross, PhD, of the University of Michigan, and Brad J. Bushman, PhD, of Ohio State University, conducted two related studies to determine whether people can reflect adaptively over negative experiences without ruminating.

 

Ethan Kross

In the first study, the researchers recruited 94 college students who were told they would be taking part in a study examining the effects of music on problem solving, creativity and emotions. After completing a baseline assessment, participants listened to “an intense piece of classical music while attempting to solve 14 difficult anagrams,” rearranging letters to form words such as “pandemonium,” according to the researchers.

With 7 seconds to complete each anagram, the participants were instructed to record their answer and communicate it to the experimenter over an intercom. The correct answer then appeared on a computer screen, and the students were asked to read the word aloud in a sentence. According to the researchers, the experimenter interrupted the participants multiple times, finally saying, “Look, this is the third time I have to say this! Can’t you follow directions? Speak louder!”

Told to go back to the anagram tasks and relive the scene in their mind’s eye, participants were randomly assigned either to adopt a self-distanced perspective (n=30), a self-immersed perspective (n=28) or a control group (n=36) that received no specific instructions on how to process the experience. The researchers measured implicit aggressive cognition using a 21-item word completion task, and anger was assessed using a combined measure of negative effect, anger, irritability, annoyance and hostility.

Participants in the self-distancing group had fewer aggressive thoughts (P<.01) and angry feelings (P<.05), compared with the self-immersed and control groups, “demonstrating that people can self-distance immediately following provocation, and that doing so attenuates both aggressive thoughts and angry feelings,” according to the researchers.

The second study was identical to the first, with three exceptions. First, participants (n=86) were told that they were to complete the anagram task with a student partner of the same sex and that researchers were testing the effects of music on cooperation as a team process. Second, participants took part in a rigged lottery to determine their role in the task, drawing one of two pieces of paper from a box, with both papers assigning the role of solving anagrams. Third, each participant was provoked over the intercom by their unseen student partner.

Participants completed the same self-reflection task required in the first study and were randomly assigned to self-distanced (n=26), self-immersed (n=27) or control (n=33) groups. Participants were then told that they would compete against the same student partner who had provoked them earlier in a 25-trial reaction time task that required them to respond to a visual cue faster than their partner. The loser received noise blasts through a set of headphones, the intensity and duration of which were determined by the winner. The intensity of the noise blasts were a measure of the participants’ aggressive behavior.

Similar to the first study, results showed that participants who used the self-distancing perspective to reflect upon the provocations displayed lower levels of aggression, compared with the other groups (P<.001).

“Previous research has focused almost exclusively on whether distraction reduces aggression,” the researchers wrote. “The current findings highlight how people can neutralize aggression while focusing on their emotions and the situation at hand — by adopting a self-distanced perspective. This is noteworthy because distraction is often not feasible in the heat of the moment.”

Disclosure: The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures.