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The DOI matches its Crossref record; 7 of the 7 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding

Bushman, Brad J.·2002·Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
DOI 10.1177/0146167202289002
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Abstract

Does distraction or rumination work better to diffuse anger? Catharsis theory predicts that rumination works best, but empirical evidence is lacking. In this study, angered participants hit a punching bag and thought about the person who had angered them (rumination group) or thought about becoming physically fit (distraction group). After hitting the punching bag, they reported how angry they felt. Next, they were given the chance to administer loud blasts of noise to the person who had angered them. There also was a no punching bag control group. People in the rumination group felt angrier than did people in the distraction or control groups. People in the rumination group were also most aggressive, followed respectively by people in the distraction and control groups. Rumination increased rather than decreased anger and aggression. Doing nothing at all was more effective than venting anger. These results directly contradict catharsis theory.

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Citations

Cites

Show all 7 references

Research works printed but not linked: 29

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Metadata

Authors
Bushman, B. J.
Venue
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Published
2002-06
Volume
28
Issue
6
Pages
724-731
ISSN
  • 0146-1672 (ISSN-L)
  • 1552-7433
DOI
10.1177/0146167202289002
OpenAlex
W2130713906
Cited by
832
References
7
FWCI
13.52
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/0146167202289002
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Bushman, B. J. (2002). Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167202289002

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.