Catharsis
Does ?bottling up? your feelings really make things worse? Is a pressure cooker really a good way to think about negative emotions? Grade school teachers, Reader’s Digest, news media ?experts?, and Oprah all told me that catharsis (letting off some steam) is necessary and healthy. However, I had never seen scientifically documentedevidence of this.
Interestingly, this study shows that catharsis is actually counterproductive. The study set out to see if catharsis was effective simply due to the power of suggestion (Oprah says it is effective, so you convince yourself it works). However, it found that catharsis was not effective at all, even in people who had the expectation that it would work. In fact, catharsis just makes you more aggressive and prolongs the negative feelings.
Now, this is just one study, and it only deals with one class of negative feelings, but it makes a certain amount of sense. And it serves to illustrate my recurring theme about media complicity in ?superstitious? science.