Social Psychology

Critique of: Catharsis, Aggression, and Persuasive Influence: Self-Fulfilling or Self-Defeating Prophecy

Introduction:

Catharsis, Aggression, and Persuasive Influence: Self-Fulfilling or Self-Defeating Prophecies is an article based on two studies that consisted of a procatharsis message and a anticatharsis message that were given to their participants to see how their aggression differed while hitting a punching bag after reading the message in which they were given. The purpose of the study was to see how aggressive a person would act while hitting the punching bag after reading the message in order to determine rather the message would be considered as a self-fulfilling prophecy or self-defeating prophecy to the participant who read the message. This article was also written to inform its readers to the questions, do media promote anger and aggression by teaching that catharsis is acceptable because it is considered to be healthy, constructive, and relaxing as long as it is displaced on an inanimate object? And, if the media messages do persuade people to believe in the effectiveness of catharsis, will their own indulgence in aggressive action produce that effect? This article also explains to a certain extent of how catharsis has its advantages and disadvantages when being displaced toward an inanimate object.

Critique of Research Design:

The group disagrees with the media saying that catharsis is a healthy constructive way of releasing anger and aggression toward and inanimate object because to us it is contradictory in some ways. We agree with the media as far as saying catharsis is healthy for an individual, but we disagree that it should be displaced on a non-human object because we feel like the anger and aggression would intensify maybe causing harm to the person who is doing the displacing and destruction of property. We agree with Tavris when he says people going to the extreme with hitting pillows, punching bags, or anything inanimate may manifest intense ferocious thoughts against who ever they feel aggression toward because they are not actually solving the problem with the person who is causing the problem. We say that the media is contradicting itself with saying catharsis is healthy if displaced on an inanimate object because the media actually lives and feed off of negative events. When a person listens to any media, people everywhere and everyday are achieving catharsis by displacing anger and aggression toward inanimate objects by vandalism, theft, and etc… The end results of doing so would be suffering the consequences of the state laws for criminal act. Also with this article, the researchers were jumping from idea to idea with no valid experiment to back them up. We agree that the article is an article to learn from, but they had no real laboratory evidence of catharsis effects.

Also, during study 1, the article failed to say if the students were of different or