Reconsider your anger

You've all been told to "put on a happy face." It made your momma happy even if it never dissuaded that serious cop from issuing you a speeding ticket.

Well, guess what? Some new research out of Carnegie Mellon University suggests that putting on an angry face might just be the right way to go ... or at least the healthier way to go.

They discovered that folks who responded to stressful situations with angry facial expressions were less likely to suffer stress-related symptoms compared to people who responded to stress with fearful expressions.

The researchers instructed their 92 subjects to do some math exercises, such as counting backward from 6,233 by 13. They were also told that they were being tested on their IQ and were harassed by the researchers about their mistakes and their slowness.

Think about it. If this were you, would you be getting angry about the test, or would you be getting anxious and fearful?

The answer to that question might reveal a lot about how healthy or unhealthy you are made by your emotions.

When the stressed-out subjects of the study were assessed for their blood pressure, heart rate and stress hormone levels (along with their facial muscle movements), they found that the angry group had lower biological stress responses than the fearful group.

Sounds to me like anger -- the much maligned and managed emotion -- is coming out of the shadows, bathed in this new light of respectability.

To understand this further, we need to go back to Psych 101: Feelings and behaviors are not the same. Anger, the feeling, is not bad. It is what we do in reaction to it that is often not above reproach.

As I often counsel patients with "anger issues": Understand it, look underneath it (hurt? fear?), make a relationship with it. Instead of being possessed by your anger, you can be in possession of it, turning it from an internal enemy to an ally. Anger is nature's way of telling us what's what for us, an internal barometer of the weather outside.

Remember your parent telling you to "count to 10" when you got angry? It wasn't such bad advice. It can divert one from being reactive and the often unproductive consequences that result from reactivity. When you give yourself some perspective you are more likely to formulate an effective response, such as asserting yourself or setting appropriate boundaries. As the Carnegie Mellon study supports, anger is adaptive.

Dr. Jennifer Lerner is not a novice when it comes to the subject. She attained some notoriety for her study on our initial emotional reactions to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.

What she and her colleagues found in that landmark study was that those who initially reacted with anger to the horrific events of 9/11 were ultimately the most optimistic and more likely to want to take action that could make the world a safer place.

In an earlier Healthspan, I wrote about the "hostile heart", that condition of chronic anger that can be damaging to one's health. Those so afflicted find themselves in a state of constant arousal, their hearts doesn't have a chance to slow down or vary its pace. Stress hormones remain chronically high. It is a slippery slope to a heart attack.

Most of the publicity garnered by anger has to do with these anger junkies. However there is the "silent majority" of the anger set, those who deny their anger, or become mired within themselves out of fear of expressing themselves when angry.

For these anger-phobes, Dr. Lerner says: "We're showing for the first time that when you are in a situation that is maddening and in which anger or indignation are justifiable responses, anger is not bad for you."

Dr. Michael O.L. Seabaugh is a Cape Girardeau native who is a licensed clinical psychologist in Santa Barbara and Santa Monica, Calif. Contact him at mseabaugh@semissourian.com.