Contrary to popular belief, venting about a friend to another may not relieve stress. However, UCLA psychologists found that it can paradoxically strengthen your bond with the listener. Their research suggests that venting can be a subtle form of competition, making the listener feel closer to you while simultaneously lowering their opinion of the person you’re complaining about.
Yet, this competitive edge disappeared when friends were overly critical of others. According to the researchers, the true benefits of venting are fostering deeper connections that can be valuable later on, as well as the positive impact of having supportive friends on one’s health and happiness.
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Everybody needs to vent from time to time. Every one of us can get really pissed off at a boss, a co-worker, or an annoying neighbor. Married people will sometimes unload on their spouses when they come home after having a bad day at the office. And we all appreciate having the ear of a friend to hear our complaints and a good friend will listen.
However, like with everything in life, there are limits to this. If you went too much to the same people then you will become a burden to your friends and family. This can cause marital problems too.
Venting about your frustrations with one friend to another isn’t necessarily cathartic, but it can make the friend you’re talking to like and treat you better, UCLA psychologists say. Their experiments show that under certain conditions, it can be an effective form of competition that makes listeners feel closer to the person venting and like the target less.
The researchers determined:
Venting about your frustrations with one friend to another may feel good, but it doesn’t necessarily reduce anger.
Experiments showed that people who listened to a friend vent liked and supported that person more than those who were vented about — but only if the person venting didn’t derogate or seem aggressive toward the other friend.
Venting might be an effective tool of competition for listeners’ affections precisely because it is not readily recognized as a tool of competition.
“Since the 1950s, we’ve known the Freudian catharsis explanation for venting is wrong. It can feel good to vent, but venting doesn’t reliably decrease anger and sometimes even amplifies anger,” said lead author Jaimie Krems, an associate professor of psychology at UCLA. “We didn’t have a good explanation for what venting does for us. So we tested a novel alliance view of venting — that under certain parameters, venting can make the people we vent to support us over the people we vent about.”
In a paper published in Evolution and Human Behavior, Krems and colleagues at Oklahoma State University and Hamilton College asked participants to listen to a friend vent or gossip about or derogate a mutual friend. Although the vignettes varied across experiments, those venting typically began by telling participants, “I’m so frustrated and hurt right now…” before venting about a mutual friend canceling on them at the last minute.
In the derogation condition, this same complaint was prefaced with: “I’m so frustrated and angry right now…” In other conditions, the participant heard the speaker gossip about having dinner with the mutual friend or vent about the speaker’s car problems.
After reading the vignette, participants rated their feelings about the speaker and the target on an 11-point sliding scale. Participants who heard people vent about a friend canceling on them liked the speaker better than the target. This was not the case when speakers derogated the target for the same behavior, shared neutral gossip about targets or vented about their car troubles.
“As much as people readily admit that we compete for romantic partners’ finite time and affection, people seem less willing to admit to competing for friends,” Krems said. “But if being relatively better liked means getting better support from friends, then we should expect some friend competition, whether or not we like that it exists.”
