We’re excited to announce the launch of The Humintell Emotion Primer – a pocketbook guide to the basics of emotion.

It’s a little book that we put together that summarizes and describes some of the major points about emotions, especially about the basic emotions that we talk about in our work and that we’ve studied and written about for decades.

This Emotion Primer starts with a little introduction and it has 7 sections– each dealing with an important aspect about what makes emotion special.

1. The first section defines an emotion from our perspective. This is so important because in our experience, most debates and arguments about emotion occur because of differences in people‘s definitions of emotion and we think it’s always important to let people know what our definition of emotion is.

2. The second section describes the various types of emotions that exist and focuses on basic emotions. Research over the past half century plus has shown that basic emotions have features that other emotions don’t have. Now, humans have a lot of different emotions and some people have suggested that we don’t believe that other emotions are emotions. Of course we do! It’s just that basic emotions are a special class or category of emotion.

3. The third section talks about those features of basic emotions that distinguish them from other types of emotion. Remember, these features have been demonstrated in decades of research.

4. The fourth section talks about the differences between emotions and feelings. This is important because many people confuse them and use those terms interchangeably in our everyday lives.

5. The fifth section is on our affective world and distinguishes emotions from other phenomena that are emotional, like moods, personalities, and psychopathologies. This is also important because many of us don’t distinguish between emotion and other affective phenomena.

6. The sixth section lists the elicitors and functions of each of the seven basic emotions. This section is really important to understand the differences among them and to gain an appreciation of why emotions were important in the history of humans and in our every day lives today.

7. The seventh section has examples of each of the seven universal facial expressions along with a summary listing of the points that are mentioned in the other sections.

8. At the end, there’s a QR code that you can also scan and that leads you to a place on our website where we have all kinds of additional readings, blogs, and videos about emotions that we’ve done in the past. This section should round out this program well with additional insights and examples.

If you put it all together, there’s a lot of information about emotions that start with this little primer and then point us in different directions.

In the end, this primer is not a novel or a long and boring scientific treatise, but it does have very quick descriptions of the most important aspects of emotions.

This is exactly the same kind of information that anyone who wants to improve their knowledge and understanding of emotion should access.

We really hope you enjoy it. Get a Humintell Emotion Primer for yourself!

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Children Sleep Study

Researchers analyzed sleep and behavior data of 143 six-year-olds, mothers of whom were trained about responsive parenting in the first 2.5 years following birth.

The children wore sleep-monitoring devices on their wrists for a week. The devices kept track of when the children went to sleep, the quality of their sleep, and how long they slept.

The behaviors and emotions of the children were then tested in person in a clinic where they participated in various tasks that were intended to evoke frustration.

One task involved each child selecting a toy that they wanted to play with from a large selection. The chosen toy was placed in a clear box and locked.  The child was then given a set of keys, none of which unlocked the box.

The team then observed the child for self-regulated behavior, including self-talk and trying each key, and a lack of self-regulation — which included throwing the keys without trying them all.

After four minutes, the children were handed the correct key to the box and allowed to play with the toy.

Another task involved in the study was collaborative, which tested the children for their ability to cooperate.

Sleep and Emotion Regulation

The results showed that the more a child’s bedtime changed each night, the worse they regulated their behavior and emotions.

Findings from the study suggest that the regularity of the children’s sleep schedules—whether they went to sleep and woke up at approximately the same time each day over the course of a week—exhibited a greater influence over their emotional control and behavior than the duration or quality of sleep.

Children with more consistent, regular sleep schedules showed greater control over their emotions and behaviors.

This research sheds light on the nuanced nature of developmental sleep research, especially regarding the relationship between consistent sleep and emotional regulation.

Though duration of sleep is important, regular and consistent sleeping and waking times may be more instrumental in supporting children’s emotional control.

Bedtime Routines

Research has also shown that regular bedtime routines are vital to getting adequate sleep, yet only about 65% of families in the US report engaging in a routine 5 or more times a week.

Certain activities might help children with sleep. These include:

• Providing a healthy snack
• Hygiene (bathing or brushing teeth)
• Reading
• Singing
• Physical contact (massage or cuddling)

Studies also show kids who don’t get enough sleep may be more likely to develop high blood pressure, obesity, even depression.

Finally, think again before you reach for that smartphone or tablet to soothe your child before bedtime- research has also shown that doing so may also affect a child’s emotion regulation ability.

References

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Doctors may soon be able to diagnose a severe form of depression, known as melancholia, simply by looking at someone’s (lack of) facial expressions.

According to VeryWell Mind, melancholia is a form of major depressive disorder (MDD) that is characterized by a complete loss of pleasure in all or almost everything.

In addition, research has found that people with melancholic depression have a higher risk for unemployment, psychotic features, inpatient treatment, and suicide risk than people with non-melancholic depression

It is estimated by researchers that about 5-10% of people who are depressed have melancholia – which could represent as many as 2 million Americans.

Depression and Facial Expression Study

The study entitled “Markers of positive affect and brain state synchrony discriminate melancholic from non-melancholic depression using naturalistic stimuli” was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.

Author Dr. Philip Mosley and colleagues showed 70 depressed people, 30 of whom had melancholia and 40 of whom did not, two different videos.

• Video 1 was a clip from Ricky Gervais‘ stand up comedy set ‘Animals,’ which involved funny skits about nature documentaries.
• Video 2 was a short film called The Butterfly Circus, which features a moving story about a circus troupe inspiring hope in Depression-era America.

While the patients watched the videos, their facial and brain activity was recorded, the former with a camera to track every minute muscle twitch during the Gervais set, the latter with the patient in an MRI machine while watching The Butterfly Circus.

Depression Study Results

The difference between the two patient sets was stark. For the Gervais video, although the patients with non-melancholic depression were still depressed, they did respond with facial expressions and giggles.

Meanwhile, the patients with melancholic depression were completely impassive. Mosley describes them like “statues” with “no facial movement at all, no smiling, no chuckling.”

Something similar happened in the MRI machine. The brains of patients with non-melancholic depression lit up, particularly in the cerebellum, which is involved with automatic emotional responses.

“With people with melancholic depression,” Mosley said, “those emotional regions of the brain – the ones involved in detecting and responding to stimuli with an emotional tone – were just doing their own thing, disconnected, not integrated with the rest of the brain, not involved in processing with other regions of the brain that are relevant in these tasks.”

Depression Study Implications

This study’s discovery could help doctors differentiate between melancholia and regular depression earlier. While melancholia is a more severe condition, it’s still treatable.

Dr. Mosley suggests these patients don’t tend to respond well to traditional talk therapy, so diagnosing them early could also help establish a more tailored treatment plan for them.

If a person with the condition is diagnosed early, most respond very well to medications, which work to balance the chemistry of the brain. And quicker treatment can help them avoid the most invasive therapies that may be required if the condition has progressed.

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C20 is a live interactive webinar hosted by Dr. Chad Kessler, Executive Director of Emergency Medicine for Veterans Affairs (VA).

The podcast was originally launched in April 2020 to provide up-to-the-minute COVID-19 news and resources quickly and efficiently to clinical employees across VHA. Today, C20 covers a variety of public health and medical topics and is available to all at VA.

It is designed to be a quick discussion where guests concisely present engaging and informative content to an audience of busy VA providers, clinicians, VA employees and Veterans.

What makes a good interaction between a physician or clinician and their patient?

Dr. Kessler and Dr. Matsumoto started by discussing physician or clinician body language as it relates to patient perception of their care.

Dr. Matsumoto believes it starts with the patient’s perceptions of how much the caregiver is interested in them.

We’ve all heard the term “active listening” but what concretely does this mean?

Spending a minute to sit down and make eye contact and ask someone how they’re doing can make a huge difference in perceived interest.

Dr. Matsumoto emphasizes there is a lot of nonverbal behavior that is centered around the concept of active listening and the “active” part of that term does not involve listening. It’s the engagement of our bodies with the individual.

Examples of engagement can include:

• Sitting (getting down to the patient’s level)
• Looking someone in the eye (pay attention to me)
• Asking simple questions (like “how are you doing”)

In fact, there is research that shows those kinds of perceptions are related to many different things in the healthcare system such as treatment regime adherence, decreases in lawsuits, better assessments, etc.

Dr. Matsumoto emphasizes that feeling seen or heard is essential to getting any interaction off to a good start.

One Mistake To Avoid When Building Rapport

What’s one mistake you can avoid to build rapport in interactions?

Dr. Matsumoto speaks about the concept of “mirroring” which he describes as a double edged sword.

Studies have shown that when people organically start to mirror themselves, they have better rapport in interactions.

However, if a person perceives that the other individual is simulating their postures, this may have the opposite effect.

Dr. Matsumoto suggests not to try and mirror the other person’s body language. Just be genuine in the interaction; listen normally, naturally, and empathetically.

When you do so, one’s body will start to engage appropriately to the interaction.

What does building trust actually mean in an interaction?

Building trust means allowing a person to be vulnerable and that person knowing they won’t be judged, criticized or attacked.

Building trust starts with non-judgmental listening.

An important reminder before engaging in an important conversation may including taking a breath or two to calm your body and mind.

Dealing with Cultural Differences in Medicine

Doctors see patients from all walks of life. How do cultural differences fit into the connection and interaction?

Cultural differences are big in nonverbal behavior but one thing that is consistent across all people of all cultures are facial expressions of emotion.

We’re all generally pretty good at reading facial expressions in others since we learn how to do so in our every day lives.

With regard to other things like orientation, body posture, orientation and especially gaze and visual attention, there are differences.

In fact, people of other cultures may perceive healthcare workers as higher status and may avoid direct eye contact because of this fact.

While the cultural differences do exist in some behavior, they can be mitigated a lot by interest and engagement behaviors.

These interest and engagement behaviors are all the same across cultures:

• Paying attention
• Direct eye contact
• Speaking nicely and empathetically
• Using our own body postures and orientation

These behaviors will go a long way in mitigating cultural differences.

To listen to the entire episode, visit this page!

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Whether we realize it or not, we’re all salespeople and every interaction is a negotiation in which we persuade and influence others.

Some of us do this professionally; sales people sell products and attempt to have people purchase those products; teachers sell knowledge and skills and attempt to persuade students to learn that knowledge and skills; law enforcement officers sell jail and attempt to persuade alleged criminals to buy jail time.

All of us do so as well in our personal lives; parents try to get their kids to clean their rooms and married couples get their partners to take out the trash.

Not only are we all salespeople trying to persuade and influence others; we’re all relatively good at it.

In fact, every individual needs to be at least somewhat successful in doing so because without some degree of success at persuading and influencing others, individuals would not survive.

Every group, society, and culture requires people and groups to persuade and influence others for the individual’s, group’s, society’s, and culture’s survival.

As John Donne once wrote in his famous poem, no man [person] is an island, and our ability to live and thrive in our families, communities, societies, and cultures is evidence of our ability to persuade and influence others.

Thus, people have learned or acquired a long time ago the basic skills necessary to persuade and influence others.

I say “acquired” because we don’t know the degree to which our abilities to influence others are hardwired into us as humans, or whether those skills are entirely learned from our cultures and communities.

I suspect that we have the biological hardware (brains) and some innate software in our minds to learn those skills from our families and communities. Regardless of their origins, however, we all persuade and influence others, and we’re relatively good at it.

Just look at the growth of the world’s population across time. If people weren’t good at persuading and influencing others, we wouldn’t get along and our societies and cultures, let alone marriages and families, would not survive and thrive.

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How does this persuasion and influence occur?

There’s a long history of research in psychology examining how people influence others.

For example, very classic research on conformity and compliance conducted by Solomon Asch demonstrated how groups can influence individuals to make obviously mistaken judgments or say obviously incorrect things.

Stanley Milgram’s classic research on obedience showed how average people will do drastic things against others on the basis of instruction from an authority figure.

Phil Zimbardo’s well-known prison study demonstrated how power assigned to a group of people made that group engage in demeaning behaviors against others who were not so assigned.

Perhaps the most well-known author in this area is Robert Cialdini. Through his own ingenious experiments and collating the results from many other studies, Cialdini extracted six universal principles of persuasion and influence that were at work when people persuade others to do something. (His more recent work identified a 7th principle as well.).

For example, consider the principle of reciprocity, which Cialdini suggested activated “the web of indebtedness.” When we receive something from someone, we have an obligation to give something back in return. This is true for getting a gift, receiving an invitation, or hearing a compliment.

Every society and culture is built on this principle; if this principle didn’t exist no society would function correctly and the alternative is social chaos.

Same is true for the principle of authority. Hierarchies exist in every society, culture, group, and organization, and if we didn’t comply to the wishes of authority, hierarchies would cease to exist and societies and cultures would not function properly. The alternative again is social chaos.

What is Tactical Social Influence?

Here at Humintell, we take that classic work on persuasion and influence and incorporate other scientific breakthroughs over the decades to deliver what we call Tactical Social Influence.

For example, one interesting aspect of all principles of persuasion and influence that is not discussed much is the fact that they all operate because of affect and emotion.

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The amygdala is part of the temporal lobe and part of a larger network in the brain called the limbic system.

When it comes to survival, the amygdala and limbic system are extremely important. These are parts of the brain that automatically detect danger and play a role in behavior, emotional control and learning.

The researchers found that pregnant women with higher amygdala activity struggled more with emotional regulation and reported more depression symptoms postpartum.

This discovery could lead to early identification and targeted emotion regulation training for at-risk mothers. While preliminary, the findings offer potential for new strategies to prevent postpartum depression.

1 in 7 Women Develop Postpartum Depression

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Aside from school incidents, workplace violence, domestic violence, and even seemingly random acts of violence on the streets of our cities and towns, buses, and trains occur all too often all across the country and the world.

The causes for these tragic events are many and one can point to social, cultural, local, familial, and individual sources for such causes.

For this reason, in my opinion a comprehensive and meaningful consideration to reducing threats and violence should consider addressing each of these, and other, levels of sources that contribute to violence.

Identifying Hateful Rhetoric

On the social and cultural level, for example, much rhetoric can be found in social media, news, and the entertainment industry, all of which appear to insight and even sanction violence.

Years ago our research team worked on identifying the elemental components of hatred among ideologically motivated groups that committed acts of violence on groups that they hated.

We were able to identify the basic emotional components of hatred and their associated verbal and nonverbal behaviors.

Using those indicators we were able to predict fairly well when groups were ramping up to engage in acts of violence against members of other groups they despised. I am convinced that those same indicators occur today when I watch or read the news, especially about politics in the U.S.

Awareness about the power of such rhetoric may be a good first step towards reducing the threats from such rhetoric.

Sometimes I fantasize about a threat indicator monitor on our televisions or computer monitors that simultaneously assessed the hateful rhetoric that is occurring; that would certainly raise awareness. We have a good idea of what such indicators are and developing such monitors is not a far-fetched idea.

Relatedly, I also sometimes fantasize about a deception indicator monitor that could do so in real time as well.

Consequences for Bad Acts

Another important social variable that has changed in recent years is the perception of consequences for bad (criminal) acts.

Seminal research conducted decades ago demonstrated that people’s behaviors were more affected not by supposedly ingrained cultural values or ideologies but because of the sanctioning system in place in which people lived.

That is, people’s behaviors were more affected by perceived rewards and punishments than other internal, psychological factors.

Given that there is clearly a perception of a lack of consequences for “bad” behavior in much of today’s society, no wonder that more bad behavior occurs, including violence, because of a perception that people can “get away with it.” That’s what also happens in anonymized environments such as online chat forums, where people can say almost anything and not be held accountable.

These perceptions permeate all of society today, including our schools.

A recent study demonstrated that teachers are more likely to quit their jobs not because of low pay but because of student behavior. People in many cities live in fear because of the perception that many crimes can be committed without fear of punishment.

Where I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, I have heard people state that they would rather not drive their cars into the city because of fear of vandalism, car jackings, or robberies.

Benefits of Play

When I was a kid growing up, I spent a lot of time outside playing with my friends, as did so many of my generation. A lot of time.

Much research has demonstrated the tremendous benefits of such play time, both physically and mentally. Physically, kids move their bodies – running, hiding, throwing things, jumping, falling, and yes arguing and sometimes fighting.

There’s no question that kids were much more physically active in the past than today. Psychologically, kids had to learn to get along with others and to “play nicely.” That is, we learned valuable lessons about respect, friendship, courtesy, and politeness.

Unfortunately, we have lost lots of that in today’s world. In my experience (backed up by research over the past several decades), kids may not be learning such valuable lessons.

The detrimental effects of the lack of play may be seen in the numerous physical ailments that affect our societies today, including being overweight or obese, or many of the childhood diseases seen today that were rare in the past.

Psychologically, kids have more difficult times interacting with others, respecting boundaries and people, and regulating their emotions. These unfortunate consequences of city life, and more specifically the perceived threats that occur in city life, were undeniably exacerbated during the Covid lockdowns.

As an aside, the major theory of cognitive development in children suggested that such development is facilitated by a child’s manipulation of the physical environment around him or her. But alas, we have reduced the opportunity for children to do so, thereby possibly hindering cognitive development as well.

These effects may be especially apparent in crucial teenage years and young adulthood, in which physical changes are occurring and in which people are finding ways to form meaningful and lasting relationships with others.

Increasing Loneliness in Young Adults

Teenagers and young adults today may find that developing and maintaining such relationships are more difficult compared to the past, contributing to the increased loneliness of the younger generation.

The well-documented negative psychological effects of smartphones and other electronic devices don’t help.

Moreover, the inability to form meaningful relationships with others, especially romantic ones, has been shown to be an indicator of violent tendencies.

These and many other social, cultural, familial, and interpersonal changes have helped to create a population that is lonelier, afflicted with personal or group based grievance, searching for meaning in their lives but having increasing difficulty finding such meaning, living in a social and cultural environment in which violent rhetoric is rampant and within which there are less consequences for bad behavior.

In this case, no wonder it is easier for people to be more disrespectful, rude, aggressive, and yes even violent toward others.

What can we do?

Well, we can’t change society and culture overall. But we can work in our families.

We can spend time talking with each other and providing our families with ways to express themselves and to learn how to interact with others.

We can provide our children and grandchildren with opportunities to move, play, interact and engage with things and others, and to develop their minds and their bodies.

And we can teach and guide them to learn how to be accountable and responsible for their actions.

Individually, we can do things like the following:

If we all do a little something to take our own personal security more seriously, hopefully we can protect ourselves and our loved ones a bit better and make our societies and communities a little safer.

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Listen to Dr. Matsumoto on Negotiate Anything Podcast

You may think that in a tough negotiation you need a good poker face, but recent research suggests that being pleasant and facially expressive could actually yield you better results.

Researchers out of Nottingham University in the UK collected data from over 1500 conversations while paying close attention to movements in the face like smiles, eyebrow raises, and nose wrinkles.

Their paper was published in Nature and is entitled “Being facially expressive is socially advantageous”.

They found that people who displayed more facial expressions were seen as more likable and socially successful.

Lead researcher Dr. Bridget Waller said this could explain why humans have more complex facial expressions than any other species.

Negotiation Study Methodology

In Study 1, the researchers recorded semi-structured video calls with 52 participants interacting with a confederate across various everyday contexts.

The researchers showed recorded clips of conversations to more than 170 people and asked them to rate how “readable” (in terms of emotions and expressions) and likable the subjects were in the videos.

In Study 2, they examined video calls of 1315 participants engaging in unscripted Zoom chats.

Facial expressivity indices were extracted using automated Facial Action Coding Scheme (FACS) analysis and measures of personality and partner impressions were obtained by self-report.

Negotiation Study Results

In Study 1, more facially expressive participants were more well-liked, agreeable, and successful at negotiating (if also more agreeable).

Participants who were more facially competent, readable, and perceived as readable were also more well-liked.

In Study 2, they replicated the findings that facial expressivity was associated with agreeableness and liking by their social partner, and additionally found it to be associated with extraversion and neuroticism.

These characteristics are part of the five most significant personality dimensions (the Big Five) identified by psychologists, which enable them to characterize personality differences between individuals in a comprehensive way:

• Openness: willingness to adopt new ideas, experiences and values
• Conscientiousness: dependability, punctuality, ambitiousness and discipline
• Extraversion: sociability, assertiveness, adventurousness, dynamism and friendliness
• Agreeableness: willingness to trust others, good natured, outgoing, obliging, helpful
• Neuroticism (Emotional stability): self-confidence, equanimity, positivity, self-control

According to the study’s abstract, “these findings suggest that facial behavior is a stable individual difference that proffers social advantages, pointing towards an affiliative, adaptive function”.

Study Implications

This is the first large-scale study to examine facial expression in real-world interactions and researchers say it suggests that more expressive people are more successful at attracting social partners and in building relationships.

The work is part of a project known as Facediff (Individual differences in facial expressivity: Social function, facial anatomy and evolutionary origin), which is funded by the European Research Council.

Detecting Deception in Negotiation

Negotiations Ninja featured Humintell’s own Dr. David Matsumoto on their podcast to discuss detecting deception in negotiation!

During the episode Dr. Matsumoto shares his insights on how to read facial expressions, emotions, and intent. For those in negotiation, it’s sometimes difficult to understand what a person is actually feeling or thinking when they’re engaging face-to-face.

Dr. Matsumoto shares the research on less obvious facial expressions a procurement professional may encounter along the way. He’s sharing research into micro-expressions including what they are, what they reveal about the person, and how they communicate with the brain.

This is a fascinating conversation about everything from discipline in judo, to the way our approximately 23 facial muscles work, to his number one tip for professionals – active observation.

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If you’re a dog owner, you know the joy of walking in through the door to be greeted by your pup excitedly wagging their tail.

But did you know that dogs are one of the few animals that use their tails primarily for communication?

Despite this fact, scientists still don’t understand exactly why dogs wag their tails. In a new paper published in the journal Biology Letters, researchers outline a few theories.

Most people equate tail wagging with a happy dog, but reality may be more complicated.

Take a look at more research out of the Canine Cognition Center here

There are many possible hypothesis for why dogs wag their tails and a couple of them are listed below.

1. Domestication Syndrome Hypothesis

This hypothesis relates to the human domestication of dogs, which began as early as 35,000 years ago.

Perhaps tail-wagging was a behavior that humans unintentionally selected for, because it was linked with other preferable traits, like tameness or friendliness toward people.

Tail-wagging may have simply been a byproduct of other specifically targeted characteristics.

2. Domesticated Rhythmic Wagging

This hypothesis suggests that humans consciously or unconsciously selected for tail-wagging during domestication, because they are drawn to rhythmic stimuli.

Tail Wagging 101

The new paper adds to the big-picture understanding of what scientists do and don’t know about tail-wagging.

The authors reviewed more than 100 studies about the behavior and summarized their findings: humans likely altered dogs’ tail wagging without realizing it.

According to the Washington Post, “the findings could flip the long-held belief that dogs are wagging their tails because they’re happy. Instead, Hersh and her colleagues suggest that dog tail-wags made people happy, so humans tended to select for that trait when welcoming dog ancestors into their lives and breeding the animal.”

Messages Conveyed by Tail-Wagging

Dogs also seem to wag their tails in different ways to convey different messages.

• Wagging more to the right means a dog is curious and wants to approach
• Wagging to the left is correlated with uncertainty
• Low tail wagging—where dogs pin their tails down against their back legs—is also linked with insecurity and submission

Interestingly, a study found that dogs began wagging their tails more than wolves when they were as young as three weeks old. And another study found that dogs wag their tails faster and more often than other canines.

Domestication of Dogs

Scientists have found that dozens of dogs’ traits and behaviors changed during domestication, including the appearance of their fur, ears, body size — and even their ability to make “puppy-dog eyes.”

In fact, eyebrows give dogs a wider range of human-like facial expressions we can identify with and they play a vital role in how dogs became “man’s best friend.”

Evolutionary psychologists even believe that centuries of domestication “transformed the facial muscle anatomy of dogs specifically for facial communication with humans”.

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Writing down your thoughts on the cause of your anger and then throwing that piece of paper away can be an effective way to neutralize your negative feelings.

The study entitled “After being insulted, writing down your feelings on paper then getting rid of it reduces anger” was published in Scientific Reports on Nature.

This important research builds on similar research on the association between the written word and anger reduction as well as studies showing how interactions with physical objects can control a person’s mood.

For example, after a bad breakup you may feel the desire to burn letters or destroy gifts from your ex.

Anger Study Methodology

For their anger project, lead researcher Nobuyuki Kawai and his graduate student Yuta Kanaya asked 50 participants to write brief opinions about important social problems, such as whether smoking in public should be outlawed.

Evaluators then deliberately scored the papers low on intelligence, interest, friendliness, logic, and rationality.

For good measure, evaluators added insulting comments such as: “I cannot believe an educated person would think like this. I hope this person learns something while at the university.”

After handing out these negative comments, the researchers asked the participants to write their thoughts on the feedback, focusing on what triggered their emotions.

One group was told to either roll up the paper with their thoughts and throw it in a bin or keep it in a file on their desk. A second group was told to shred the paper, or put it in a plastic box.

The students were then asked to rate their anger after the insult and after either disposing of or keeping the paper.

Anger Study Results

As expected, all participants reported a higher level of anger after receiving insulting comments.

However, the anger levels of the individuals who discarded their paper in the trash can or shredded it returned to their initial state after disposing of the paper.

Meanwhile, the participants who held on to a hard copy of the insult experienced only a small decrease in their overall anger.

Researchers concluded that “the meaning (interpretation) of disposal plays a critical role” in reducing anger.

The Japanese Tradition Hakidashira

This process is like a Japanese tradition called hakidashisara, in which people write their negative thoughts on a plate then destroy it.

Along with its practical benefits, this discovery may shed light on the origins of the Japanese cultural tradition known as hakidashisara (hakidashi sara refers to a dish or plate) at the Hiyoshi shrine in Kiyosu, just outside Nagoya.

Hakidashisara is an annual festival where people smash small discs representing things that make them angry.

The study’s findings may explain the feeling of relief that participants report after leaving the festival, the paper concluded.

Kawai imagines using his research to help businesspeople who find themselves in stressful situations.

“This technique could be applied in the moment by writing down the source of anger as if taking a memo and then throwing it away when one feels angry in a business situation,” he explained.

For another helpful guide to anger, read this past blog post from Humintell.

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