I'm glad it helped your grieving process, and a big yes to the reality of "this is hard to study".

I have an intuition that catharsis as part of a grief process might be quite different (more useful) than in situations where the anger arises out of other circumstances.

For the value of an anecdote: in my grieving process, I tried several forms of catharsis: hitting a heavy bag, yelling, running and biking angry. In every case, it made me more angry. I got worse. The anger turned inward. It wasn't until I stopped that approach that I made any progress in my grief.

> Any sort of cathartic experience would necessarily be self-reported and we all know the accuracy of self-report studies.

That's not true. In the article, they mention observational studies wherein folks who vent are more likely to lash out. That isn't self-reporting.

> Since the students weren’t randomly assigned to either vent or not, it’s possible that the most anxious are the ones who chose to vent (so that venting was correlated with increased anxiety, not the cause of it)

Yes, that particular study may have flaws in its execution. But that doesn't prove that studies on venting are necessarily self-reporting.

I've seen someone close to me have some kind of a cathartic process and get a lot better. It also required finally facing (at least some of) their emotional blocks or trauma, so it's not like venting alone did much of anything. But I'm pretty sure that if they hadn't got the opportunity to air a lot of their previously suppressed feelings in emotional safety, the rest of it also wouldn't have happened.

I don't think aggressive venting alone is going to do much, but whenever I come across one of these studies that purport to show catharsis as not existing, I can't avoid feeling there must be more to the story.

Some people are also going to interpret "catharsis/venting does not work" as meaning it's perfectly wise to not listen with actual empathy and just slam solutions at people instead. But that also doesn't work.

Tbf, this study only examines catharsis as it relates to anger, not grief. Those emotions involve different networks in the brain, so it's perfectly plausible that catharsis would work differently.

One of a few studies I've read followed people and found that people who engage in catharsis do it more often and have lower tolerances to irritants.

One of the earlier studies just had people's anger tracked(anger has a very clear physiological response). So no need to have it self reported.