Blowing off steam or picking a scab?
Different conceptualizations of what it means to express anger.
Anger is pretty fundamental to the human experience. In fact, most taxonomies of emotion posit anger (or rage) as a core emotion, typically alongside emotions like fear, happiness, and sadness.
But what I’m interested in here is not so much the feeling itself––or at least, not only that––but rather, how we talk about that feeling. Specifically, I’m interested in the way we describe expressions of anger.
At least in my experience1, people often rely on metaphors when they talk about expressing (or not expressing) their anger. They say things like:
Thanks for letting me vent––it feels good to let it out.
Or:
I’ve bottled up my rage for too long.
Or:
I need to blow off some steam.
Notice that both these expressions construe anger, and its expression, in a particular way. Anger is conceptualized almost like hot steam in a container, which builds up over time and eventually must be let out (or “vented”) in some way.
There’s also some corpus evidence that similar metaphors are used in other languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Hungarian.
And it’s not hard to see why people use this particular metaphor. Our embodied experience of anger often involves physiological effects like increased blood pressure, blood running to our face, and faster breathing. Additionally, the "steam in a container" domain also gives us a lot of linguistic tools to express concepts like the intensity of anger ("filled with"), as well as our control ("contain") and the loss of it ("couldn't keep inside").2
But we also have to be careful not to mistake the map for the territory. There are important differences between these two domains. When we vent steam from a container, it implies that there is less steam in the container than before––we’ve reduced the pressure. This is not necessarily true of expressing anger: anger is not literally steam, and so expressing it may not always have the effect of decreasing our angry feelings.
Metaphors as maps
A metaphor is a way of describing one domain in terms of another. For example, when we say “He’s a very cold person”, we’re describing a person’s demeanor or behavior as a kind of temperature––drawing on the metaphor that affection is warmth. Similarly, when we say “Stop wasting my time”, we’re describing time as a valuable commodity.
In the book Metaphors We Live By, authors George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that metaphors are not mere linguistic flourishes: they are everywhere, in fact, and are foundational3 to our cognition. Many conceptual domains are described––and perhaps also conceptualized––in terms of other domains. In conceptual metaphor theory, the respective domains involved are called the target (i.e., the thing being described, like affection) and the source (i.e., the domain being used to describe the target, like warmth).
Critically, however, metaphors are not perfect representations of reality. A source domain like warmth is not literally the same as a target domain like affection: rather, the former is being used to help make the target domain more vivid. But not everything that’s true about warmth is true of affection.
An oft-cited example of the mismatch between source and target domains is found in sentences like:
She gave you a great idea.
This relies on the metaphor that communication is a kind of object exchange. In this metaphor, ideas are objects that we package into words and sentences; these ideas are shared by sending those packages from one person (a speaker) to another (a listener).
Yet this metaphor has some strange implications if we take it absolutely literally. First of all, it implies that ideas exist independently of the minds of either the speaker or listener––like a physical object. Apart from the Platonists among us, I don’t know many people who hold that view. And second, if ideas really are like objects that we exchange, then “giving” someone an idea implies that you no longer have it. This, of course, is also not true. An idea does not vanish from your head simply because you’ve told it to someone else.
Metaphors, then, are kind of like maps. Maps are very useful for representing a territory, but they are not literally the same as the territory they represent.4 Rather, they represent particular features of that territory––such as the names of roads or addresses, the kind of terrain, and more. In this way, metaphors are one of the many linguistic and conceptual tools available for construing the world around us.
Rage, construed
Earlier, I listed some examples of construing anger in terms of steam in a container, like:
He needs to blow off some steam.
I also pointed out that this metaphor leads to some possibly incorrect implications. Specifically, venting leads to less steam in a container-–but it doesn’t necessarily always lead to less anger. At least in my experience, expressing anger (or complaining, etc.) sometimes makes me even angrier. It also cements that reaction as my default one.
I also know that I’m not alone. One of the reasons I’ve been thinking of this is that I came across this quote from the journalist Matthew Yglesias on his newsletter Slow Boring:
Basically, though, I think most people can get kind of mad and act out a bit, and that blows off steam and helps them feel better. But just like alcoholics can’t have a beer and a half and leave it there, when I start expressing anger, it spirals and goes to bad places. So I try, to the extent possible, to not do that.
It’s hard to imagine a better encapsulation of what I’m describing here: for some people, expressing anger has a way of making them even angrier.
Which takes me to an alternative construal of what it means to express anger: for those people, perhaps, expressing anger is more like picking at a wound. Once treated, wounds need to be left alone to heal, allowing a scab to form. But if you constantly pick at a wound, it can fester and become infected, making it much harder to heal.
Alternatively, one could adopt Yglesias’s metaphor of an alcoholic going on a binge if they allow themselves to indulge even a little. I think this metaphor system has pretty similar implications as the “picking a scab” metaphor. Crucially, both of them conceive of anger as a kind of habit––and habits get entrenched the more we enact them. This implies that if one’s goal is to feel less angry, then expressing anger is not the best way to go about it.
Again, this is in sharp contrast with the “blowing off steam” metaphor. That metaphor implies that if one’s goal is to feel less angry, then it’s helpful to express some of that anger.
Both metaphors are right in their own way
I think it’s a mistake to ask which metaphor is the “right” one. Both of them are right in their own way, and their suitability likely depends on factors like:
The person in question.
The situation.
The manner of expressing anger.
It’s undeniable that the “blow off steam” metaphor resonates deeply with many people. I suspect they’d say something like:
It’s not healthy to bottle up all that anger––it’s got to come out somehow.
The implication here is that sooner or later, the steam’s going to vent from the container. The question is just whether we have control over that process; if we don’t vent the anger ourselves, eventually we might just “explode”.
In response, someone who prefers the “picking a scab” metaphor might say something like:
It’s important to move past your anger––don’t let it fester.
The implication here is that at least at a certain point, indulging in our anger just makes it worse; the wisest course of action is to forgive and forget, as they say.
Do these metaphors really make a difference?
So far, I’ve been writing as though these distinct construals of anger have cognitive consequences of a sort. Yet as far as I know, there hasn’t been much empirical work on this question. Most of what I’ve found has focused on which metaphors are used in large-scale linguistic corpora––which is also an interesting and important question but which doesn’t demonstrate that these metaphors shape how we think about anger.
There is plenty of evidence that metaphors can shape our conception of other target domains. In this article, the authors summarize a range of studies that find that metaphoric construal shapes how people think about topics like global trade (is trade a war or a two-way street?), the stock market (is it an agent or an object?), business failure (is it a vehicle failure or a storm?), cancer (is it an enemy or part of our journey?), and more.
It’s an open question, then, whether and how construing the expression of anger as “blowing off steam” or “picking a scab” affects which course of action we think is most appropriate when one feels anger––and, of course, which course of action we actually take.
Which is primarily with speakers of American English.
This is perhaps also related to Humorism, the idea that different personality traits are constituted by varying degrees of different chemical systems in action––yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood.
Another metaphor: an important part of a theory or system is its “foundation” (alternatively, a “cornerstone”).
Jorge Luis Borges makes this point satirically in the short story On Exactitude in Science.