This TED Talk features psychologist Ryan Martin recorded live at TEDx Fondulac, 2018.

All right, so I want you to imagine that you get a text from a friend, and it reads,

You will not believe what just happened. I'm so mad right now.

So you do the dutiful thing as a friend,

and you ask for details,

and they tell you a story about what happened to them at the gym

or at work or on their date last night,

and you listen and you try to understand why they're so mad.

Maybe even secretly judge whether or not they should be so mad.

And maybe you even offer some suggestions.

Now, in that moment, you were doing essentially what I get to do every day, because I'm

an anger researcher.

And as an anger researcher, I spend a good part of my professional life, who am I kidding,

also my personal life, studying why people get mad.

I study the types of thoughts they have when they get

mad, and I even study what they do when they get mad, whether it's getting into fights or breaking

things or even yelling at people in all caps on the internet. And as you can imagine, when people

hear, I'm an anger researcher, they want to talk to me about their anger. They want to share with me

their anger stories. And it's not because they need a therapist, though that does sometimes

happen. It's really because anger is universal. It's something we all feel, and it's something they can relate

to. We've been feeling it since the first few months of life when we didn't get what we wanted

in our cries of protests,

...