![]() ![]() (Poon did not respond to requests for comment.)Įven though a link between graphic fantasies of violence and feeling not so great might sound logical, for much of modern psychology’s history, that link wasn’t assumed. “Anybody who you asked to fantasize about someone they hate … is going have more negative affect in the moments afterward,” Reidy says. So prompting someone to do it would usually cause the rumination-and its attendant negative effects-to continue. As Poon’s study notes, rumination can be difficult to stop once it starts. (Those people sound great.)Īnother issue, Reidy says, is that violent fantasy itself is a form of rumination. No measure of the participants’ subjective well-being was taken before they were asked to fantasize, for instance, and more than a dozen participants were excluded from the study’s results because they either couldn’t name a nemesis or couldn’t conjure up a violent fantasy. Poon’s study asserts that violent fantasies themselves cause a person to feel worse, but Reidy wouldn’t go that far, because of what he sees as weaknesses in the study’s approach. “They are more negative people, and are more likely to have negative affect and lower subjective well-being.” “People who have aggressive fantasies are more likely to be aggressive, whether it’s physically or just a sense of irritability or hostile personality,” he says. ![]() Thinking about hurting a sworn enemy bums people out, even if, on a certain level, the idea is really appealing.ĭennis Reidy, a professor involved with Georgia State University’s Center for Research on Interpersonal Violence, says there’s much scientific evidence for the link. The results suggested that those who fantasized about aggression were more likely to ruminate, which then lowered their perception of their own well-being. The other participants were asked to fantasize about taking any neutral action. Half were asked to fantasize about doing something violent to that person (which could involve murder, but could also just be an angry slap). Kai-Tak Poon, an assistant psychology professor at the Education University of Hong Kong, led a team that asked a group of 138 American adults to pick the person they hate the most. Based on new research, there might be another way to spark rumination: to fantasize about killing someone you absolutely hate. Typically, rumination is spurred by things like past trauma, chronic stress, or neurotic personality traits. It’s marked by intrusive, even obsessive thoughts that return a person to a particular stressor or negative experience, which the American Psychological Association says is strongly linked with the development of major depression. In psychology, rumination isn’t so harmless. ![]() You wouldn’t want to ruminate.Ĭolloquially, rumination has a benign meaning: to contemplate deeply. What I will say, though, is that you should stop yourself now, and go no further. I also won’t ask you to name all the definitely valid reasons you might have for wanting to murder-or maybe just punch!-the other person involved, but I suspect that for most people, it has crossed their minds. I wouldn’t encourage you to spend too much time dwelling on all the rejections and confrontations that might have led to such an angry moment, but I do need you to think about those things briefly. Have you ever thought about killing someone? Not plotted it out, necessarily, but fantasized about offing a bully or boss or boyfriend in a desperate search for catharsis? ![]()
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