I surprise me that before taking up Kyokushin Karate, I had a short temper and would easily get hot headed when conflicts arise. I'm currently training in the martial arts and it did help IMPROVE my anger management. From how I see it, martial arts may be pure combat but it also teaches both discipline and control, at least from the art I'm taking. And I'm sure there are people here who feels the same way.
The way I see it, martial arts, especially "hard" arts are very good stress relief as you are always moving, and are often put under even greater stress than what you were before hand which makes the previous irrelevant That helps stop me from wanting to smash in the face of everybody I meet. Edit: keep in mind I know basically nothing about the above text, is just my opinion.
I had a terrible temper and was a bit of a scrapper in my early teens before I started training and I do feel it helped balanced me out and as I caught the martial art bug and was always training so kept me away from bad influences. I have definately tempered with age but I do promote MA as one of the main factors in controlling my old temper and just making me into a nicer member of society. Osu! Dan93
Any hard physical exercise helps with stress relief. With martial arts it helps even more as we train to keep calm so a move can be properly executed. When I first started in high school, I stopped getting in fights not because my temper improved but because I realized what a deadly fighting machine I had become in about two months of training! I had a responsibility to not just kill and maim my classmates over petty insults! :ninja2: I really believed it at the time! But hey, at least it kept me out of trouble.