Reminds me of an excerpt from the book The Body Keeps The Score:
When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it. I am reminded of the comedy in which a seven-time recidivist in an anger-management program extols the virtue of the techniques he's learned: "They are great and work terrific-as long as you are not really angry.
In the moment it's incredibly difficult to think rationally enough to breathe and/or meditate. You're a car hurtling down a ravine bound to crash.
This illustrates an interesting and important point that Bushman has been highlighting over and over and over again. Some of Bushman's stuff has been questionable but this one is maybe nonignorable.
One important caveat to it though is that there's a lot of research showing anger and aggression are not the same thing. Anger is more of an emotional state that tends to be more highly related to other negative emotions, and aggression per se is more of a behavioral control state that tends to be more correlated with other forms of dysregulation and disinhibition.
Along these lines, I sometimes think the "high arousal" strategies are not so much about decreasing anger, but more so about diverting the arousal associated with anger toward a nonaggressive response. I also question whether some of these strategies are always helpful "in the moment" in taming anger in all individuals. It's one thing to include this type of training in a controlled environment or study; it's another thing to employ it in "real world" "hot" scenarios where the "autodeescalation" or lack thereof is in fact the problem.
In those cases, it might be easier to channel arousal into a nonaggressive or nonharmful activity than to turn the arousal down. So I think these kinds of studies help clarify what different strategies do and do not do, but I'm not sure that if a strategy doesn't decrease anger per se, it is useless in decreasing aggression.
When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it. I am reminded of the comedy in which a seven-time recidivist in an anger-management program extols the virtue of the techniques he's learned: "They are great and work terrific-as long as you are not really angry.
In the moment it's incredibly difficult to think rationally enough to breathe and/or meditate. You're a car hurtling down a ravine bound to crash.