Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Jan Black. And I'm Laura Owens. Do you often get angry? Do you think people in general are more angry these days than they used to be?

And how can we best cope with our own anger and that of those around us?

To help answer those questions, we turn to our guest on this episode, anger expert Ryan

Martin, who's a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay. Among other things, he researches and writes on

healthy and unhealthy expressions of anger. He also blogs about anger for psychology today, and he just

did a great TED talk on why we get mad and why it's healthy. Ryan, thank you so much for joining us

today. Oh, thank you so much for having me. Your job is really interesting, and we're wondering

how you got into being an anger researcher. Anger has been something I've been interested in

for a very long time. Actually, as far back as when I was in college, I was really intrigued by

why a lot of the kids I was working with got angry. So I used to work at a shelter

for at-risk adolescence. This was in St. Paul, Minnesota, and I would just see a lot of anger

amongst the children that were residents there. And I think one of the things that was interesting

is what I realized later, much later, is, you know, how much these kids had to be angry about and, you know, that the world had been very, very unfair to them.

So they had a lot to be hurt by, a lot to be sad about, a lot to be angry about.

But what was also true is that they weren't really handling that anger in a very productive, healthy way.

And of course, they weren't.

They were kids, right?

And so it's understandable.

And so I went on to graduate school because at the time I thought I wanted to be primarily

a therapist working with adolescents and started working with a researcher named Dr. Eric

Dallan.

He's an anger researcher at the University of Southern Mississippi where I went to school. And from there, I just realized how much I loved research, how much I loved teaching,

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