Kim Mills: We all know what it feels like to get angry. Another driver cuts you off in traffic or runs a red light right in front of you, you miss out on a promotion to someone you feel is less deserving, your kid stops away yelling that they won't listen to you anymore. Your stomach churns, your pulse races, and you think, “How dare they?”
Anger is a normal human and emotion, a natural reaction when you feel that something or someone has done you wrong. But anger can also turn violent and dangerous. It can ruin relationships and it can interfere with our health and our happiness. So how do you know when anger is healthy and when it's harmful? Are there effective strategies you can use to cope with anger when it's interfering with your life? What if your anger threshold is different from that of your partner? When you feel angry, is it better to let it all out or hold your emotions in? And how do you know if it's time to seek help from a psychologist or other mental health professional?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.
We have two guests today. First is Dr. Howard Kassinove, a professor emeritus of psychology at Hofstra University, where he was the founder and director of the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Anger and Aggression. Dr. Kassinove has more than 40 years of experience as a scientist and a clinical practitioner studying anger and aggression management.
Our second guest is Dr. Raymond “Chip” Tafrate, a clinical psychologist and professor in the department of criminology and criminal justice at Central Connecticut State University. Dr. Tafrate frequently consults with criminal justice agencies and programs, community mental health centers, and private practices, and has trained thousands of professionals to work more effectively with adolescents and adults with difficult to change anger problems. Together, Dr. Kassinove and Dr. Tafrate have authored two books: Anger Management for Everyone: Ten Proven Strategies to Help You Control Anger and Live a Happier Life, and The Practitioner's Guide to Anger Management.
Thank you both for joining me today.
Howard Kassinove, PhD: Our pleasure.
Raymond “Chip” Tafrate, PhD: Great to be here.
Mills: Let's start with what we mean by “anger.” People often think that anger and aggression are synonymous, but they're not the same thing. So what is anger? How is it different from aggression? And, Dr. Kassinove, let's start with you on that one.
Kassinove: Anger is a complex reaction to perceived threat. We can feel threatened when our children are hurt by other kids, we can feel threatened in the workplace, we can feel threatened by neighbors. There are all kinds of threats that exist in our lives, and anger emerges when we perceive that threat. And when I say it's complex, what I mean is that when we become angry, we often have thoughts that go through our mind like, “The boss has given the raise to another worker, he shouldn't have done that. This is a terrible, awful thing.” So we have these thoughts that go through our mind. We also have a lot of behaviors, and by that I mean we will yell and scream and flail our hands around, we may engage in some kind of vengeance against the other person. And of course there are physiological or biological reactions also to threat where our heart rate increases and our response to light increases and we secrete chemicals. So it's this complex reaction all of which has to be dealt with in therapy or in treatment.
The second part, what's the difference between anger and aggression is—it's very interesting, anger is primarily an internal response. We know we're angry, we feel it inside. We can be angry and other people may not know that we're angry. As a matter of fact, if you look in terms of international or national negotiations, if a person becomes angry, you're not supposed to let your opponent know about it. On the other hand, most people who become angry do not become aggressive, we just become angry. It seethes inside of us, maybe we talk to our marital partner about it, et cetera.
Aggression on the other hand, can definitely occur without any anger at all. Think for a moment about a hunter going out for the day to shoot animals, that hunter is not angry at the animals, he or she sees it as an activity of the day. So anger can be followed by aggression, but most of the time it's not. Aggression can occur after anger. As I said, most of the time, it's not, but aggression can be a totally independent behavior where the goal is to harm, to engage in some kind of behavioral harm without any anger at all.
Mills: Chip, did you want to say something?
Tafrate: Yes, and I think this is a common misunderstanding about anger. People think of the word anger and the next word that pops into their mind is aggression. In a lot of anger training workshops, we sometimes do this exercise. We ask all the participants—and they're usually practitioners of different types—we ask them, “How many of you have experienced anger in the past week?” And it's normal for people to feel angry one or two times a week, that's just typical, so when you ask a room full of people to let you know if they've experienced anger, pretty much all the hands in the room go up. And then you ask a second question, “How many of you have assaulted somebody, destroyed property, punched a wall, kicked somebody in the past week when you were angry?” And there's almost no hands that go up in the room.
But the most interesting question is the next one, “How many of you at some point in your life, when you were angry, have hit, struck, pushed, kicked somebody?” And it's an uncomfortable moment, but almost all the hands in the room go up again. So I think what Howie and I are saying is that aggression is the least common response often when people are angry, and on studies where they actually count and measure this, anger is the thing that have happens kind of—it's like the least common thing on most of these surveys. However, as the hands in the room exercise shows, all of us know the connection between anger and aggression, most of us have been there and we understand the destructive connection that can occur. And I would say for most of the listeners on this podcast, probably some of your most cringeworthy moments occurred when you were angry at somebody.
Mills: So to follow up on that, is there a “normal” level of anger and “normal” amount of anger that people could expect to experience during a week, during a month, during a lifetime?
Kassinove: Yeah. You know, Chip gives the notion of once or twice a week is kind of normal. We use four criteria. We ask, is the anger that you're experiencing too frequent, too intense? Does it endure for too long? And is your anger helpful? Is it working in your family, in your job? Is it making you a more productive citizen? So if you're becoming angry once a week, twice a week, if it's of low level, if it doesn't endure, and by that I mean you don't let the anger fester for days and weeks and months, and if your anger is serving as a signal, I would say.
In other words—let's take that workplace example again, the boss hires somebody and that other person is getting some extra benefits and you are aware of this and you kind of become a little bit agitated, a little bit, then the anger is serving as a useful signal to talk to the boss and say, “You know, I've been here for a long time and this new guy or new woman has a better desk or has better working hours or things like that, and I'd like to talk to you about that.” So yes, not too intense, not too enduring, not too frequent and helpful, that's the sign of good anger.
Mills: So then is there a clinical anger disorder? And if so, what are the hallmarks?
Kassinove: Well, you know Chip and I—and Chip, we can both answer this. Regrettably there is not an official diagnosis that's a clinical anger disorder. And I would say think about this, human beings were brought up as part of the fight or flight reaction. So anger is an approach emotion and it occurs when you feel threatened. Anxiety is a withdrawal emotion and if you feel threatened, you withdraw. We have lots of anxiety diagnoses, but we've had no anger diagnoses, and when we try to bring this up to our colleagues, we don't make much headway at all.
Mills: Why do you think they're resistant to that?
Kassinove: I think because anger is considered to be a moral emotion. And by that I mean, “Oh, you're suffering from anxiety. Oh, you poor person, I feel so sad for you, I feel so bad for you, and we better have all these diagnoses and treatments to help you.” Anger on the other hand is, “You shouldn't have done it. You're an evil person, I want to punish you.” And that doesn't lead to diagnosis, that leads to criminal justice intervention.
Chip, did you want to—
Tafrate: Yeah, I think there's a lot of reasons why anger has been ignored historically, and you have to kind of almost go back to the Western philosophers who got it right, who really labeled anger as a sort of significant human problem. And then along came psychology and anger and aggression became sort of intertwined in psychoanalytic theory, the idea that everyone has sort of an innate aggressive drive. And the behavior has also kind of lumped anger and aggression together, the idea that anger's just sort of a weaker expression of aggression. Then we get to another area where they've got it right, emotion researchers. Emotion researchers have suggested that there's a handful of basic emotions that all human beings are capable of experiencing. They're interwoven into the fabric of our sort of evolution and anger is one of those basic emotions. It's on everybody's list.
So I think that's one of the reasons why anger has been ignored, it's just the sort of historical place that anger has had in psychology. Sometimes we refer to anger as the forgotten emotion, because there's no diagnostic category where the emotional excess is primarily anger. In fact, anger is rarely mentioned in the DSM, it's always a secondary symptom to other problems.
There's another, I think, more practical reason that as psychologists, when we pick our areas of study, we spent our life studying anxiety and depression and maybe it's because anxious and depressive individuals are a little easier to work with. Angry clients can be difficult, they can be unpredictable, unpleasant and I think in some ways professionals have not embraced people with anger problems.
Mills: So let me ask if there is a significant gender difference in how people tend to experience and express anger. Do women or men get angry more often or do they just express anger differently?
Kassinove: I'm actually kind of interested as to whether or not Chip and I will have the same answer. I'll start if I can, Chip, and then we'll see what you say. My answer is, no. My answer is that the triggers that set us off, the perceived unfairness and the reactions are pretty much the same. Some early studies show that women would cry more when they were angry and men would not cry more. Some studies that I've read would say that women are more likely to talk it out rather than men. But when I look at the database, I think men and women are pretty much equal in anger. Not in aggression, of course, because men have larger muscles, larger body mass and can be more aggressive and do more damage. But with regard to anger, I think the answer is pretty much it's an equal opportunity emotion.
What's your answer, Chip? I'm not sure.
Tafrate: I've come to the same conclusion. And I want to go back to one of the first treatment studies that Howie and I did, and this was in the 1990s. We were quite naive then, and we really thought anger was a male problem. So we kind of put up advertisements for men who are between the ages of 25 and 50, and the ads went something like this, “Are you a man between 25 and 50? And do you struggle controlling your anger? If so, please give our clinic a call, we'd like to talk with you and offer you free treatment for your anger.”
Right, and so we would get calls and back then we had an answering machine, right? So we would go to the clinic and play the calls from the answering machine. I'll never forget that we got a couple calls that sounded like this, “You know, I saw your ad and I have an anger problem and I'd like free treatment, but I'm a woman and you people are sexist.” After getting a handful of calls like that, we started to wonder maybe these women are right, you know? So I very much agree with the idea that in all sorts of different clinical settings, you'll see anger as a problem for both men and women and it's definitely a mistake to assume that women don't suffer from anger problems.
Mills: Well, let's talk for a minute about adaptive and maladaptive anger. The question is, is anger always bad for you?
Kassinove: Well, the answer to that is no, there is both adaptive and maladaptive anger. I'd go back to the point of anger, when it's adaptive, is a signal. It's not of extreme intensity or duration, but it's a signal that something is going wrong. When you feel angry inside, you want to say, “What's going on in my life? What's going on with my child? Is it important to express the anger at this point?” Take the example for a moment of you're a parent with a young child, and let's say the child is three or four years old. The child could walk and is in a city, and the child runs into the street and barely misses being hit by a bus. Is that a time to say, “Oh, honey, please don't do that, be careful”? Or is that a time to kind of be a little aroused and agitated and say to the child, “Never do that again.” In that kind of situation you want what we call one-trial learning. You can't expect to take 10 or 15 trials of the child running into the street before you try to control his or her behavior, right? So in that sense, the anger for the parent is a signal to take an effective action.
Mills: Let's look for a minute about people who are in relationships where the level of anger and anger tolerance is really different. So say one partner grew up in a household with a great deal of anger expression while the other came from a background where anger wasn't acceptable, just wasn't expressed, or rarely expressed. Can such a couple reach some kind of a detente that works for both of them? And if so, how?
Kassinove: Well, it's kind of interesting because I think in all relationships, there has to be some kind of detente about lots of things, not only anger, but about how you spend your money, and what kind of religion do you want to bring a child up in, or how often do you want to go on vacation? No man and woman, let's say, or no two partners who get together are going to be the same on any of these levels including anger. So for me—and again, I'm interested in Chip's reaction. For me the most important part of making your relationship work is what we call assertiveness training. And by that, I mean not the common definition, but assertiveness really means the proper and appropriate expression of emotion and desire for change.
So those couples that you mentioned, both partners, have to say things like, take an example, “When you spend so much of your money on clothing and I observe that, I feel kind of annoyed. Not angry, bitter, hostile, rageful, but I feel annoyed and I'd like to talk to you about that, because my sense is I'd like to spend more of our money on vacations and you'd seem to want to spend more of it on clothing. Let's talk about this and get it onto the table.” So open discussion starting off with the feeling, “I feel annoyed, I feel mildly angry, I feel somewhat agitated, let's talk about it.” That's the way to get through this.
Mills: Right, but not accusatory.
Kassinove: Not accusatory. Right. As a matter of fact, I'm happy you say that Kim, because accusatory verbalizations are unfortunately a major part of anger. Think of it in terms of childrearing, you know? “You make me so angry,” you're saying to your daughter or son, “You cause so many problems for me.” So yeah, you don't want any of that blame.
Tafrate: You know, it's an interesting question, Kim. I'm kind of smirking here on the side because I don't recall ever seeing a study looked at different kinds of couples and their anger patterns and looking at potential compatibility and so there's a lot of unanswered questions in the anger arena. I would just say that we tend to grow through relationships, and having close relationships with others helps us question our own patterns. But the example you brought up raises all sorts of questions. So at the extreme ends, you have people that are kind of avoidant and anything that's uncomfortable, they won't discuss or talk about. On the other extreme, you have people that engage in intimidating and threatening behaviors that shut others down. So I'd have to imagine that if you have a couple where partners are on different ends of the extremes on both of those dimensions, that it's probably not going to go very well.
Mills: Well, let's talk about the idea of catharsis. Some people feel that when you're angry or even just stressed, that the best thing to do is scream and yell and let it out. In the past few years, we've seen rage rooms, for example, where people pay money to go into a room and scream and smash things.
Dr. Tafrate, let me ask you, what do you think of this idea? Do rage rooms and primal screams help people deal effectively with anger and frustration? Or is this counterproductive?
Tafrate: In terms of people who struggle with anger difficulties, it's counterproductive. This kind of worries me because the treatment landscape right now seems a little bit like the wild west. And what I mean by that is you have all sorts of different practitioners, you have folks that are licensed and credentialed, you have what I would describe as life coaches who offer their opinions, then you have other people that are kind of advice givers and let's call them influencers. So there's lots of mythology and misinformation out there and catharsis is one of those. I saw this on my local news channel the other day, they were talking about primal screams and I was really kind of shocked.
But this is a problematic intervention. So you can think of anyone who suffers from emotional excess, so let's say depression or anxiety, you would never turn to someone who's suffering from depression and say, “Hey, if you don't have the energy to go to work today and you're not feeling confident, just go back to bed.” Right? You wouldn't take someone who's anxious and say, “When you're at the cocktail party and you feel a little bit activated, just walk out of the room and leave the party and avoid it.” So that's kind of what catharsis is. We're telling people when you're angry, go with the action tendency that's built into the emotion. And really the trick is to sort of do the opposite of that, is to fight against the action tendency and to kind of ask yourself the question, “Where's my anger taking me in this moment? And can you try some different behaviors?”
So when people are anxious, we ask them not to avoid. When people are depressed, we ask them to push themselves against that feeling of pulling back from their lives. And when people are angry, we ask them to not give in to the urge to yell and scream and vent and punch and hit things. So there's been a number of studies on this, there's been studies in the '70s, '80s, '90s, and a couple in the 2000s, almost no one in the academic arena is studying this anymore because we know the answer. This is actually an intervention that makes people worse, because what you're practicing is connecting the internal emotion of anger with problematic verbal behaviors or aggressive behaviors.
Mills: It's interesting because the section of APA's website that offers information for controlling anger before it controls you, is consistently one of the most accessed areas of the entire site. And what that says to me is that people are having anger problems and they don't know where to go to get the help. Do you think as a society that we're giving people the information and the tools that they need to understand and control their anger?
Kassinove: Well, of course I can put in a plug for the American Psychological Association, because podcasts like this and some of the other informational resources that you have really does help the public. We do try to get scientific information out to the public. And this notion of catharsis is like one of the most important areas because it's shocking to me that after all of these years, the question still comes up and as Chip said, we know the answer. If you practice being angry, you'll become more effective at being angry. There's no such thing as letting it out. And by the way, I would just use that term. It's not like you have two quarts of anger inside of you and you're going to let it out, like the historic notion of bloodletting will let it out, you know? What it is, is behavioral practice, and if you practice yelling and screaming and throwing and hitting and breaking, you're going to become more effective at yelling and screaming and hitting and breaking, et cetera.
Mills: So if I have an anger management issue and I go to see a psychologist or another licensed practitioner who's going to help me, what can I expect? What will that person tell me I should be doing to get control of my life and my anger?
Tafrate: It really depends on the practitioner and how they were trained. And so we have to have a little truth in advertising here that we don't know as much about anger as we do anxiety and depression, so there's a lot of variability, I think, in how treatment is delivered. I think both of us can speak to what some of the best practices might look like and one of the first steps is to understand what anger looks like in the context of the person's life. So not everyone's anger patterns are the same, people cause damage to different parts of their lives, their relationships, their work lives, some people have trouble with impulsiveness and aggression. So it's not a cookie cutter approach. We like to start off by analyzing our clients' individual episodes of anger and understand the components that make up those anger episodes. And once we understand that it becomes a little bit more obvious to the client and to us what areas we might look at in terms of intervention.
Kassinove: It's interesting you asked that question, Kim, and I want to come back to you for a moment. Look at the questions that you're asking, they are mostly what I'm going to call social interpersonal. And when Chip says, we don't know as much about anger and we have to therefore be careful and do a good interview and tailor our treatment. Consider this, one of the outcomes of anger that we haven't spoken about is bad decision making. When you're angry, that may not be the time to ask your boss for a raise.
We haven't spoken about that. We haven't spoken about the fact that there are lots of biophysical medical outcomes of sustained anger. Sustained anger over the years is associated with high blood pressure, digestive problems, heart disease, stroke, right? So as clinicians, we also want to look into those factors, into the cognitive factors. We haven't spoken too much—and I must say, Chip is an expert in this area—in terms of the effects of anger on arrest and incarceration and the criminal justice system. I mean, it's such a broad negative emotion when it becomes extreme that we really have a lot more to learn.
Mills: I think also in terms of what we're seeing in society at large, I mean, it seems like there's almost a kind of virality, is that the right word? Where my being angry can trigger other people to be angry? I'm thinking for example, of the Ahmaud Arbery case that was just tried in Georgia, where these neighbors all got together and fed off of each other. I mean, is that a typical thing where people who are angry feed other angry people?
Kassinove: You know, there's a wonderful word that I learned a few years ago called “emnification,” E-M, emnification. It means finding an enemy. And yeah, you may live in a community where one person is targeted as an enemy, and then you wind up gossiping about that person and generating the anger against that person by talking about it constantly, by not giving that person—whether it's a minority man running down the street or whatever it is, not giving that person the benefit of the doubt, but saying, “we've known all along about that person. You know about that person, Kim. You know about that person, Chip. I know about that person," and yes, we do feed on each other and make it worse.
Tafrate: And there's also this proliferation of reality television shows in American culture, and it seems like people that are selected to be on reality shows often have poor emotion regulation, which can be entertaining to watch, right? But unfortunately, the types of nasty and verbal rants and sometimes the physically aggressive behaviors that you see on these shows get modeled as legitimate ways to resolve disagreements in the face of life's challenges. So I think that in some cases we've seen individuals who express their anger in destructive ways receive positive attention, maybe celebrity or some type of financial gain. Unfortunately, these types of reactions in the real world tend to damage relationships and lead to suffering and losses for most people.
Mills: Do you see cultural differences in anger? I mean, it always feels to me like we're a particularly expressive society in that respect and I know—it feels to me like there are other cultures where it's actually verboten, and I'm just wondering if you see that in your research.
Kassinove: Well, cultures are so broad, there's so many different types of cultures. If you go to Nepal, if you go to India where Chip and I have both been, if you look at some of those cultures where the Jains, they don't even want you to step on an ant on the floor because that would be a sign of aggression. Then you look at some of the Southern United States subcultures, where there is this culture of getting even, of being macho, of taking the bull by the horns no matter what the outcome. The culture is so broad that I don't think I could make a firm statement about it.
Chip, any thoughts or you all right?
Tafrate: You know, it's a great—yeah, I mean, I can share personal stories from my travels of how anger sort of looks differently in different cultures, but I think what's important to remember is that anger as a basic emotion does exist across all cultures. So whether you live in the most remote rainforest in the world or the most cosmopolitan city, you're wired to experience anger. What changes drastically across cultures are the expressive patterns that are sort of permitted within that culture, and so you see more expressive cultures and cultures that are less expressive. I found in my travels that when you go to countries where expressing anger is not considered appropriate, people are still angry. You sit down and have lunch with them and they're kind of gossiping negatively and kind of undermining some of their enemies and colleagues. They're not looking angry, but they're doing it in different ways. So I think anger's always there, it's just what are the rules of the culture that permit anger or sort of dampen certain expressive patterns down?
Kassinove: Yeah, I would say, Chip, not only the rules of the culture, but maybe the rules of the individual. And by that I mean I've been to Russia quite a few times, as has Chip, and I think back in the late 1990s, I did a large scale study of anger and what we call our anger model, meaning we look at the various components of anger, and basically I found no differences. The Russians responded to our anger model, which was basically the triggers of anger, what you thought about the trigger, et cetera, et cetera. Russians and Americans responded exactly the same way, yet as we make this broadcast today, Putin is invading Ukraine and he's acting, I believe, as a dictator, meaning as a single-minded person. So when we talk about anger and aggression, I think there may be broad cultural differences but there are also an awful lot of individual differences.
Mills: So one of the things that we like to do when we're talking about these kinds of issues for our listeners is to try to give them some effective strategies if they're struggling with the question at hand. And I'm wondering, I know you've both written a book about this, what are the highlights of what you found around the most effective strategies that people can use to manage their own anger? People who don't necessarily need to go for a clinical intervention, but are trying to work through things themselves.
Kassinove: Yeah, we may have different answers on this one. I think for me, one of them is to ask yourself, is this issue all that important? If my child was not selected for the school play, if the other worker at work did get a better desk, if any of those things occurred, is this really such a big deal? Is it such an awful and terrible and horrible thing? We have lots of examples we could give where the child who's not selected for the school play, who's treated unfairly, goes on to be a great actor, right? Because it's motivating. So we don't really know the answer to what various life events will have on our future. And if there's a simple thing I would say is, think about whether it's worthwhile making a mountain out of a molehill in the issue that's affecting you right now.
Tafrate: Kim, I think there's reasons for optimism. There's been a handful of sort of meta-analytic reviews in the treatment area and they all point to the same conclusion, that people that get treatment do better than people that don't. There is a little less clarity around what are the best interventions for anger. We don't have as much research to sort of point to, is there a treatment of choice? And so that question gets asked a lot, what should I be doing to manage my anger? The bad news is we don't have a treatment of choice. The good news is we don't have a treatment of choice and there's a number of things that practitioners and individuals can do to combat their own sort of anger patterns and still be evidence based. So we kind of liken—in our approach at least, we liken it to a menu-driven approach.
It's kind of like going to a restaurant and selecting those interventions that seem to fit best with the context of your life and the kinds of anger problems that you're having. And I can read to you some of those from the list, but this could a very long conversation. But I think there's things like managing your lifestyle, getting enough sleep, watching your eating habits. We teach people that they don't have to confront everything. Agree to let go of some things, you don't have to confront—you don't have to be the policeman of the universe and scream and yell out your window when someone cuts you off, so learning to sidestep provocations. Instead of reacting on autopilot, try to come up with some innovative ways to respond to some of the challenges in your life. There's a whole bunch of interventions around relaxation, mindfulness, meditation that get people to calm their body, to slow down their impulsive decision making.
One of my favorites is exposure, the kind of way you think about exposure interventions for anxiety, where we actually practice with people dealing with some of the challenging scenarios in their lives and have them come up with better behaviors. Then there's a whole bunch of interventions in the thinking area, helping people kind of look at their thoughts in the moment when they're angry and try to be more realistic and less distorted. Then we had this idea of just kind of going through life with a more flexible philosophy.
There's also some good information bubbling up around teaching people to approach life with a little bit more forgiveness and compassion. And then we have a whole area of just teaching people skills for how they sort of negotiate outcomes with people, how we mentioned assertiveness training. But sometimes we'll teach people just basic interpersonal skills like what are you doing with your hands when you're talking to people and disagreeing with them? How loud is your tone of voice? How close do you get to them? So sometimes our clients can benefit from some really basic coaching in their skills. And so there's not one intervention, there's a whole host of things here and Howie, I don't know how you'd answer that question about what the best treatment is for people that have anger problems.
Kassinove: You know, I think Kim's question was could I come up with one thing to say, and that's why I went to the “don't make a mountain out of a molehill.” But I think everything that you say is absolutely correct, Chip, and on the money and I'm totally with you. So I would now come back and say one of the things that I think people can do is read self-help books, because what Chip has just gone through is our series of interventions, which basically include worksheets, explanations, opportunities for practice. So yes, all of the data show that going to a mental health professional like a psychologist trained in the area of anger does work, will be helpful. Those are the meta-analyses. But reading some good self-help books can also be helpful.
Now I want to say something I think is important too. There are a lot of not good self-help books out there, books that are telling you that you have a volcano inside of you that's erupting, for example. I think Chip and I do not believe you have a volcano inside of you. I think the only thing you have inside of you is your heart and your liver and your pancreas and all that kind of stuff. So what you really want is books, and there are a few of them out there, ours, but some others by people who've been studying anger for all of their lives. I mean, Chip and I have been doing this, I have to say, since the early 1990s, and we do have maybe, I'm going to say, 10 other professionals around the United States who've also been in the anger area and have been studying it as their life mission since the 1990s. And they we've put out a series of self-help books as we have, that can be very effective, but be careful about the ones that are talking about volcanoes or making false promises. Those are the ones that are going to be careful of.
Tafrate: Yeah. I think our advice is to seek out credentialed licensed practitioners that have some experience in the area, whether you're talking about consuming self-help materials or going to see a professional in the context of a therapeutic treatment.
Kassinove: What I've noticed over the last five or 10 years with the increase in social media is mental health professionals giving a list of what they consider themselves to be expert in. And they list maybe 20 different areas: anxiety and depression, anorexia and nervosa, marital problems and geriatric and what have you. Chip and I don't say that. I think Chip and I say, “anger has been our life passion.” And as I said, there are 10 or 15 other people that really have made that anger their life passion. Those are the ones that I would be trying to consult with and to read their books.
Mills: Well, thank you. I think the that's been very helpful advice and I hope our listeners appreciate that. We'll try to have some resources on our webpage for people to refer to. So I appreciate your joining me today.
Dr. Tafrate, Dr. Kassinove, thank you very much.
Kassinove: Thank you.
Tafrate: My pleasure.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. That's speakingofpsychology, all one word, @apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan. Thank you for listening.
For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.
Howard Kassinove, PhD, is an emeritus professor of psychology at Hofstra University, where he was founder and director of the university’s Institute for the Study and Treatment of Anger and Aggression. Kassinove has more than 40 years of experience as a scientist and a clinical practitioner studying anger and aggression management. Kassinove is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science, and is board certified in clinical psychology. He has co-authored two books about anger with Raymond “Chip” Tafrate: Anger Management: The Complete Treatment Guidebook for Practitioners and Anger Management for Everyone: Ten Proven Strategies to Help You Control Anger and Lead a Happier Live.
Raymond “Chip” Tafrate, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Central Connecticut State University. Tafrate frequently consults with criminal justice agencies regarding difficult-to-change problems such as anger dysregulation and criminal behavior. He has presented his research on anger and anger management throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, and has published numerous journal articles, book chapters, and books.
