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What Triggers Anger in Everyday Life? Links to the Intensity, Control, and Regulation of These Emotions, and Personality Traits
Abstract
Why do people experience anger? Most of our knowledge on anger-triggering events is based on the study of reactions at a single time point in a person's life. Little research has examined how people experience anger in their daily life over time. In this study, we conducted a comprehensive examination of the situational determinants of anger over the course of three-weeks.
Using daily diary methodology, people (N= 173; 2342 anger episodes) reported their most intense daily anger and with an open-ended format, described the trigger. Participants also answered questions on anger intensity, control, and regulatory strategies, along with baseline personality trait measures.
Using an iterative coding system, five anger trigger categories emerged: other people, psychological and physical distress, intrapersonal demands, environment, and diffuse/undifferentiated/unknown. Compared with other triggers, when anger was provoked by other people or when the source was unknown, there was a stronger positive association with anger intensity and lack of control. Personality traits (anger, mindfulness, psychological need satisfaction, the Big Five) showed few links to the experience and regulation of daily anger.
Although aversive events often spur anger, the correlates and consequences of anger differ depending on the source of aversion; personality traits offer minimal value in predicting anger in daily life. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Supplementary resources (2)
Data
April 2016
Data
April 2016
... Anger can be elicited by many different causes. In a recent study Kashdan et al. (2016) identified five categories of triggers: other people, psychological and physical distress, intrapersonal demands, environmental aspects, and diffuse or undifferentiated triggers (relevance in that order). In this study, anger-related feelings and behaviours were stronger when the trigger was another person in comparison to the other triggers. ...
... Such further insight is not only of theoretical relevanceit is also of practical use, for instance in the applied clinical context. A considerable amount of research on interventions that would help people cope with anger-induced aggressive behaviour focuses on outwardly observable facets of anger measured with trait questionnaires (Del Vecchio and O'Leary 2004;Kashdan et al. 2016;Saini 2009). When developing interventions to cope with maladaptive types of anger one has to be mindful of the fact that different dimensions and phases of anger may require different coping strategies (Kashdan et al. 2016). ...
... A considerable amount of research on interventions that would help people cope with anger-induced aggressive behaviour focuses on outwardly observable facets of anger measured with trait questionnaires (Del Vecchio and O'Leary 2004;Kashdan et al. 2016;Saini 2009). When developing interventions to cope with maladaptive types of anger one has to be mindful of the fact that different dimensions and phases of anger may require different coping strategies (Kashdan et al. 2016). Collecting first-person data on the qualitative phenomenology of anger could be a method for differentiating various anger dimensions in a more fine-grained way and to better tailor interventions to the individual needs. ...
Anger is known to be a negatively valenced emotion that can trigger different forms of harmful actions. Traditionally, it is studied from a third-person point of view using behavioural tasks or trait questionnaires. These methods can grasp outwardly observable behavioural expressions of anger but cannot tap into its experiential dimension. Hence, first-person approaches can be useful to get a more complete picture. In the current study we investigated the experiential facet of anger episodes using a first-person introspective approach. Findings from our introspective trial showed 1) that the anger experience can be subdivided into a cognitive, affective, somatic, and volitional component, 2) that anger unfolds in a temporal manner with distinct characteristical stages and 3) that anger can be inhibited through cognitive control strategies. While conducting our introspective research, we observed several methodological challenges of this particular method. An overview of how to deal with these issues is provided, thus contributing to anger research in both a theoretical and a methodological way.
... Furthermore, anger as a construct is not aggression (Kassinove, & Tafrate, 2002), it is the result of various factors contributing to anger that facilitates aggressive behaviour (Nasir, & Ghani, 2014;Neighbors, Vietor, & Knee, 2002;Averill, 1993). In other words, it's the individual's reaction to certain anger-triggering events that leads to aggression (Kashdan, Goodman, Mallard, & Dewall, 2015). Having said that, it is suggested that suppressed anger and limited emotional regulation, leads to aggressive behaviour (Eisenberg et al., 2001) and emotional dysregulation (D'Agostino, Covanti, Monti, & Starcevic, 2017). ...
... 1 Tristone Coaching's Children's Healthy Anger Management Programme (CHAMP) Anger and Shame (Self-esteem) Anger, when activated, initiates the fight or flight response (survival instinct) (Lotfali, Moradi, & Ekhtiari, 2016), provides motivational tendencies (Kashdan, et. al., 2015) and somatic energy to respond towards the perceived threat or escape from it. Suppressing this energy over long periods of time, interrupts or disconnects the pathways used to transmit messages between the limbic system and the prefrontal cortex in the brain, fundamentally altering its structure which can eventually lead into the develo ...
... without question that all adolescents experience anger as a basic emotion (Ekman, 1992), and most find anger difficult to manage (Phillips-Hershey & Kanagy, 1996). With this is mind it can be argued that there is a fundamental need for anger-coping strategies for young people (Chin, & Ahmad, 2017). Considering anger is neither healthy or unhealthy (Kashdan, et. al., 2015), the way anger is expressed determines whether the outcome is healthy or not (Kashden et al., 2015). To give an illustration, aggressive anger could be seen in a pupil who has hit another pupil because they borrowed a pencil without asking: this explosive behaviour would be deemed as expressing anger unhealthily (Kashden et al., 2015;Si ...
Anger is a primary emotion activating the fight or flight response in humans; telling them to act. Often, the behaviour is aggressive and there is an increase of angry young people worldwide. As a result, effective anger treatment services are in demand. However, the lack of evidence-based practice makes it difficult to ascertain the best service for these angry adolescents. This phenomenological study explored the experiences of 4 adolescent males (mean age: 12) who participated in a psychoeducational anger management programme with positive psychology interventions included. The adolescents were identified as having anger and shame issues. From the interpretative phenomenological analysis with regards to the participant’s experience of the anger management programme and the effects it had on their phenomenon, four main themes emerged: practical support, non-judgemental communication, acceptance and interpersonal skills, and improved ability to manage anger. The findings show that the programme was beneficial, and ameliorates and alleviates the participants' anger.
... What are the factors that lie behind people's reactions if they experience anger? It has been suggested that both anger experience and expression depend on situational (e.g., another person's misdeeds, physical and psychological distress) and dispositional factors (e.g., intrapersonal demands, low agreeableness, high neuroticism); there is, however, little insight into the interplay between the two (Affleck et al., 1999;Mazerolle et al., 2003;Kashdan et al., 2016). It has also been suggested that experiencing one emotion (i.e., anger) can instantly elicit other emotions that interact with the prevailing emotion (Izard, 1972). ...
... The Big Five personality traits are also often examined with regard to anger experience and expression, with anger experience being typically related to neuroticism and anger expression to agreeableness (Costa et al., 1989). It should be noted, however, that a recent study on anger experience in everyday life did not find any significant associations between the Big Five personality traits and daily anger experiences (Kashdan et al., 2016). A recent study by Pease and Lewis (2015) showed that neuroticism and agreeableness were associated with the trait-level components of the expression of anger, whereas conscientiousness and extraversion were linked to the more focal components of anger expression. ...
... Our findings broadly support previous studies suggesting that there are dispositional factors that influence the etiology of anger experience and expression, personality traits of Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Extraversion and Conscientiousness can be seen as temporally stable psychobiological basis of behavior. Although a connection between personality traits and anger has been suggested in previous studies (Hofmans et al., 2008;Jones et al., 2011), a recent daily diary study by Kashdan et al. (2016) did not find a link between personality traits and the regulation of everyday anger. ...
The main aim of the current study was to examine the role of co-occurring emotions and their interactive effects with the Big Five personality traits in anger expression. Everyday anger expression (“anger-in” and “anger-out” behavior) was studied with the experience-sampling method in a group of 110 participants for 14 consecutive days on 7 random occasions per day. Our results showed that the simultaneously co-occurring emotions that buffer against anger expression are sadness, surprise, disgust, disappointment, and irritation for anger-in behavior, and fear, sadness and disappointment for anger-out reactions. While previous studies have shown that differentiating one's current affect into discrete emotion categories buffers against anger expression (Pond et al., 2012), our study further demonstrated the existence of specific interactive effects between the experience of momentary emotions and personality traits that lead to higher levels of either suppression or expression of anger behavior (or both). For example, the interaction between the trait Openness and co-occurring surprise, in predicting anger-in behavior, indicates that less open people hold their anger back more, and more open people use less anger-in behavior. Co-occurring disgust increases anger-out reactions in people low in Conscientiousness, but decreases anger-out reactions in people high in Conscientiousness. People high in Neuroticism are less likely to engage in anger-in behavior when experiencing disgust, surprise, or irritation alongside anger, but show more anger out in the case of co-occurring contempt. The results of the current study help to further clarify the interactions between the basic personality traits and the experience of momentary co-occurring emotions in determining anger behavior.
... In contemporary life, anger is the emotion far more likely to be associated with reactive aggression. While self-imposed demands, psychological or physical distress and frustration ("goal blockage") can elicit anger, it is provoked more frequently and severely by interpersonal negligence, disrespect or threat to possessions, self-esteem, reputation or harm to the self or valued others (Kashdan et al., 2016). From an evolutionary perspective, anger may function to motivate people into actions that forestall or counter exploitation and aggression directed at them, but that they would judge too risky if they were not angry (Fessler, 2010). ...
... The most reliable and strongest elicitors of reactive aggression in the laboratory are anger-provoking interactions with another person, real or apparently so (Anderson and Bushman, 2002;Kashdan et al., 2016). In daily life, fewer than 8% of people report that their anger leads to aggression while only 10% of anger episodes result in some form of aggression, according to community surveys (Averill, 1982;Okuda et al., 2015). ...
Human aggression typologies largely correspond with those for other animals. While there may be no non-human equivalent of angry reactive aggression, we propose that human proactive aggression is similar to offense in other animals' dominance contests for territory or social status. Like predation/hunting, but unlike defense, offense and proactive aggression are positively reinforcing, involving dopamine release in accumbens. The drive these motivational states provide must suffice to overcome fear associated with initiating risky fights. We term the neural activity motivating proactive aggression "non-angry aggressive arousal", but use "angriffsberietschaft" for offense motivation in other animals to acknowledge possible differences. Temporal variation in angriffsberietschaft partitions fights into bouts; engendering reduced anti-predator vigilance, redirected aggression and motivational over-ride. Increased aggressive arousal drives threat-to-attack transitions, as in verbal-to-physical escalation and beyond that, into hyper-aggression. Proactive aggression and offense involve related neural activity states. Cingulate, insular and prefrontal cortices energize/modulate aggression through a subcortical core containing subnuclei for each aggression type. These proposals will deepen understanding of aggression across taxa, guiding prevention/intervention for human violence.
... Magee and Biesanz examined the ways in which the Big Five personality states affected short-term experiences of well-being, and the results showed that emotional stability and extraversion exhibited the strongest associations with well-being, followed by conscientiousness and then agreeableness [21]. In addition, another group studied the "Big Five" personality traits and their relationship to the daily experiences and regulation of anger; however, they found that personality traits offered minimal value in predicting anger in daily life [22]. The correlation between personality traits and mental disorders is also a research hotspot. ...
... The reason for associating both fear and anger with the dimension of neuroticism (emotional instability) ( Figure 1) is that anger and fear (fight or flight) are perhaps the same emotion, like two sides of the same coin; thus, anger and fear can be placed in the same position on the axis [38]. However, it has also been found that broad personality traits (i.e., the "Big Five") are less related to angry experiences in everyday life [22]. The correspondence between neuroticism and anger needs to be further explored. ...
Objective:
Recently, many emotional diseases, such as anxiety and depression, have prevailed, and it is expected that emotional disease will be the leading cause of social and economic burden in 2030. These emotional diseases may be due to certain personality traits, which could be the reasons for the development of mental illness. Personality theories have been constantly developed over the past hundreds of years, and different dimensions of personality traits corresponding to different physiological bases and emotional feelings have been proposed. However, personality may be the least studied area in psychology.
Methods:
In this paper, we will give a short review on the development of personality theories as well as dimensional emotional theory. Then, we will compare the similarities between the emotional dimension and personality dimension. Furthermore, we will also investigate the neural mechanisms of personality and emotions, focusing on neuromodulators for anxiety-related personality traits, in order to provide a clear relationship between different neurotransmitters and anxiety-related personality traits.
Results:
The results of our study suggest that the emotional dimension and personality dimension may be somewhat related, for example, the extrovert/introvert dimension of personality might be related to the hedonic dimension, which includes happiness/sadness, and the neurotic dimensions might be related to emotional arousal. In addition, our study found that personality traits are also related to basic emotions, for instance, people who are too self-centered are prone to feeling a mood of disgust or depression, while anger and fear correspond to unstable personality traits. The analysis suggested that the neural substrates of both personality and emotions might be described as follows: extroverted-joy-dopamine (DA); introverted-disgust-5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT); unstable (neuroticism)-anger/fear-noradrenaline (NE); stable-calmness.
Conclusions:
The results of this study suggest that there is a correlation between personality traits and emotions, and both depend on monoamine neurotransmitters (dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin). In addition, personality disorders can be interfered via the regulation of emotions and neurotransmitters. This paper opens up a whole new perspective for future research on personality traits and emotional diseases and has great clinical value and practical significance.
... 256). Furthermore, anger can arise for unclear reasons and be activated by a diffuse/undifferentiated trigger, i.e., when the anger source is unknown; in the latter case, anger tends to be more intense and less controllable (Kashdan et al., 2016). Thus, the deeper roots of human anger seem to be elusive. ...
Drawing on religious thought and critically examining psychological approaches, this paper introduces and defines the concept of self-immanent pride, a phenomenon conceived as the source of destructive managerial anger. To untangle the complexity of self-immanent pride and its anger-engendering quality, this paper ascertains the prototypical forms of self-immanent pride, elaborates on its characteristics, and posits chronically inflated self-esteem as a path from self-immanent pride to destructive managerial anger.
... According to their model of individual differences in emotion regulation, the effectiveness of emotion regulation strategies also depends on so-called individual antecedents, i.e., personality and temperamental traits. Because some research (Kashdan et al., 2016) on the anger experience does not confirm a direct relation between the Big Five personality traits and anger, we assume that temperament could be a more promising predictor of anger regulation. Numerous studies, including brain (e.g., Aslan & Arkar, 2016) and behavioral research (e. g. ...
People regulate their anger using various strategies applied to different phases of the emotional process. However, research investigating the effectiveness of anger regulation strategies in reducing anger is inconsistent, and some evidence indicates individual differences as a factor behind this variability. We aimed to test the role of temperament (stimulation processing capabilities, SPC) in two phases of anger regulation: vulnerability to anger arousal and reducing experienced anger. The study was conducted using a questionnaire and an experimental procedure. Participants (N = 241) completed the Formal Characteristics of Behavior – Temperament Inventory (Revised version). During the experiment, they performed two tasks: an unsolvable task that induced anger, and a task that activated an anger regulation strategy (humor, downplaying, rumination, or distraction). The state of anger was measured three times with a self-report: before the experiment started, after anger induction, and after applying the anger regulation strategy. We used linear mixed-effects models to analyze the data.
The results showed that people with greater SPC are less prone to experiencing anger and decrease their anger more effectively. However, various components of SPC (emotional reactivity and endurance) have different significance in each phase and for particular strategies.
... The source of stress also influences strategy selection. One study shows that the strategies people choose to regulate daily anger are influenced by what or who triggered the anger (Kashdan et al., 2016). Taken together, research suggests that strategy selection to regulate distress is not a uniform process and is influenced by contextual (e.g., Aldao, 2013) and individual differences (Doré et al., 2016). ...
Much is known about the types of strategies people use to regulate emotions. Less is known about individual differences that influence emotion regulation strategy selection. In this study, we tested the moderating role of negative emotion differentiation (NED; i.e., the ability to label and describe subtle differences among negative emotions) on the relationship between the intensity of stressful daily events and the strategies used to regulate distress arising from these events. Prior research shows that NED is associated with low endorsement of disengagement emotion regulation (e.g., substance use), but less is known about the link to engagement regulation (e.g., problem-solving, seeking social support). Participants were college students (N = 502) completing a 30-day daily diary survey for each of four college years. We preregistered hypotheses that 1) the intensity of each day's most stressful event would be associated with greater use of disengagement and engagement regulation strategies, and 2) people higher in NED would be less likely to use disengagement and more likely to use engagement strategies when highly stressed. Results suggest that higher stress intensity is associated with greater use of all regulation strategies. Greater NED is associated with less use of disengagement regulation strategies, whereas NED was unrelated to engagement regulation strategies and did not moderate the relationship between stress and engagement strategies. The majority of hypothesized moderation effects of NED were nonsignificant, prompting a reconsideration of whether, when, and how NED plays a role in stress responding. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
... However, the authors do not refer to any theory or study explaining what anger is and why it is experienced. In fact, anger appears to be provoked by different triggers, such as other people, psychological and physical distress, and intrapersonal demands (Kashdan et al., 2016), and different individuals may experience anger in different ways and for different reasons (e.g., Jones et al., 2011;Pease and Lewis, 2015). All these factors are not accounted in the user study reported in the article. ...
Over the last ten years there has been a growing interest around text-based chatbots, software applications interacting with humans using natural written language. However, despite the enthusiastic market predictions, ‘conversing’ with this kind of agents seems to raise issues that go beyond their current technological limitations, directly involving the human side of interaction. By adopting a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) lens, in this article we present a systematic literature review of 83 papers that focus on how users interact with text-based chatbots. We map the relevant themes that are recurrent in the last ten years of research, describing how people experience the chatbot in terms of satisfaction, engagement, and trust, whether and why they accept and use this technology, how they are emotionally involved, what kinds of downsides can be observed in human-chatbot conversations, and how the chatbot is perceived in terms of its humanness. On the basis of these findings, we highlight open issues in current research and propose a number of research opportunities that could be tackled in future years.
... 49 It is possible that structural brain changes resulting from chronic drug exposure may interfere with anger experience in an age-independent manner, as cognitive processing and decision-making deficits in this population are well described. 70,71 In addition, brain changes appear to be long-lasting and related to a breakdown in emotional self-regulation and increased sensitivity to stressful stimuli. 72,73 Nevertheless, the intensity of the anger experience may differ depending on the drug, age of onset, frequency, and concomitant use of other substances. ...
Objective:
Conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis to evaluate levels of anger among substance users compared to non-user controls and to analyze the possible association between anger and psychoactive substance use (PSU).
Methods:
The procedures of this review followed the Meta-Analyzes of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (MOOSE) and Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Four electronic databases (MEDLINE, EMBASE, BIREME, PsycINFO) were searched.
Results:
Twelve studies were included in the meta-analysis; 10 used the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI) anger trait subscale and two used the Buss-Perry-Aggression Questionnaire (BPAQ) anger subscale. The sample included 2,294 users of psychoactive substances and 2,143 non-users, all male. The mean difference in anger scale scores between users and non-users was 2.151 (95%CI 1.166-3.134, p ≤ 0.00, inconsistency index [I²] = 98.83) standard deviations. Age and abstinence duration did not moderate the difference in anger between substance users and non-users.
Conclusion:
Users of psychoactive substances had elevated anger scores compared to non-users, which represents a high risk of relapse. It is suggested that PSU treatment programs include intensive anger management modules, focusing on factors such as dealing with daily stressors, family conflicts, frustrations, and problems.
... Although anger and aggression are often studied together (Gresham, Melvin, & Gullone, 2016), nonetheless these two factors are different aspects. Anger refers to the emotion one experiences (Kashdan, Goodman, Mallard, & DeWall, 2015), while aggression refers to the act (Wilkowski & Robinson, 2008/2007. Nonetheless, like aggression, anger also is a strong predictor for perpetration (Hein, Koka, & Hagger, 2015;Tanrikulu & Campbell, 2015); explicitly, the higher the anger level, the higher the likelihood of perpetration (Bosworth, Espelage, & Simon, 1999). ...
... Due to many uncontrollable variables outside of labs, the number of field studies is limited in this context. For example, in a study by Kashdan et al. (Kashdan, Goodman, Mallard, & DeWall, 2016) using daily diary methodology, anger was the most intense emotion reported by participants that were regulated variously depending on its triggering factor. Another study (Brans, Koval, Verduyn, Lim, & Kuppens, 2013) used an experience sampling method to identify the most frequently used ER strategies and their impacts on changing positive and negative affect in daily life. ...
Introduction: During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak, news media has played an important role in informing people to satisfy their curiosity about this stressful condition. Regular exposure to such stressful news may elicit different emotions in people and engage them in using strategies to control their emotions. In the present study, we aimed at exploring the most common negative emotion(s) experienced by individuals, as well as the most frequent Emotion Regulation (ER) strategies used facing the COVID-19-related news. We also examined whether the variable of personal relevance can moderate these emotional responses.
Methods: 617 individuals living in Tehran who regularly read the news about the COVID-19 from the early stages of spread completed an online survey. After excluding the participants with high scores from the Beck Depression Inventory (>18), data obtained from 443 participants were analyzed in terms of the experienced negative emotions and ER strategies.
Results: Anxiety (55.8%) was the most common negative emotion reported by participants facing COVID-19-related news and problem-solving was the most frequent strategy used to control negative emotions. Both groups with high and low personal relevance indicated a similar pattern in experiencing high and low arousal emotions, as well as using ER strategies, and no significant differences were found (X2=0.006, p=0.51; X2=0.14, p=0.39, respectively). We also found that participants with high scores in the resilience scale used an integrative rather than a single approach of the ER strategies (rbp=0.15, p=0.01).
Conclusion: We found that during the COVID-19 outbreak, news media may have important role in triggering anxiety in people who regularly read the relevant news, and problem-solving was the most frequent strategy among them. Being directly involved with COVID-19 in personal life did not make any differences in the way that individuals emotionally respond to the news. While using an integrative approach in regulating emotion was found in more resilient individuals
... With regard to anger perseveration, parents and adolescents experienced carryover of anger from day to day. This is consistent with research on emotion regulation that suggests that anger is more difficult to regulate than other emotions, especially anger that results from an undifferentiated source (i.e., not tied to any event/interaction) rather than a specific causal event (Kashdan, Goodman, Mallard, & DeWall, 2016). Thus, anger that results from previous anger may be involved in a regulatory process that is difficult for individuals to resolve, resulting in more perseveration at a daily level. ...
Parent-adolescent conflict has been studied both as a precursor of long-term macrolevel developmental risks and as an outcome of microlevel, moment-to-moment interaction patterns. However, the family-level processes underlying the maintenance or regulation of conflict in daily life are largely overlooked. A meso-level understanding of parent-adolescent conflict offers important practical insights that have direct implications for interventions. The present study explores day-to-day reciprocal processes and carryover in parents' and adolescents' experiences of anger and conflict. Daily diary data provided by parent-adolescent dyads (N = 151) from two-caregiver households (adolescents: 61.59% female, mean age = 14.60 years) over 21 days were examined using a multivariate Poisson multilevel model to evaluate the circular causality principle in parents' and adolescents' daily conflict and anger. Findings offer empirical support for the theory, suggesting that parents' and adolescents' anger and conflict exist together in a feedback loop wherein conflict is both a consequence of past anger and also an antecedent of future anger, both within and across persons. Increased understanding of the daily interaction patterns and maintenance of parent-adolescent conflict can guide more informed, targeted, and well-timed interventions intended to ameliorate the consequences of problematic parent-adolescent conflict sequences.
© 2019 Family Process Institute.
... Instead of focusing on couple relationships alone, we measured anger in family interactions involving the father, mother, and child, since anger problems are relevant to both the marital and parent-child relationships. We used observational methods to assess anger during naturalistic family interactions at family homes for several reasons: first, anger is an emotional response that often occurs when other people are involved (Kashdan, Goodman, Mallard, & DeWall, 2016) and is more likely to impair one's interpersonal relationships than other kinds of emotion (DiGiuseppe & Tafrate, 2007, p. 46). Second, displays of anger are important for determining whether the exhibited anger is maladaptive (Fernandez & Johnson, 2016). ...
Anger‐related problems have been documented among post‐deployed service members who returned home, posing risks to their well‐being and increasing distress in their families. Trait mindfulness (acting with awareness, nonjudging, and nonreactivity) has been associated with lower self‐reported anger. Using actor–partner interdependence models, we tested the association between trait mindfulness and parental anger observed in parent–child and couple interactions. The sample consisted of 155 dyads of male National Guard/Reserve members who had been recently deployed and returned, and their female non‐deployed partners. Results showed that fathers’ and mothers’ nonreactivity was negatively associated with their own observed anger, indicating that parents who reported higher nonreactivity exhibited lower anger. Mothers’ nonreactivity was also negatively associated with observed fathers’ anger in the same family such that fathers exhibited lower anger when their female partner reported higher nonreactivity. Nonreactivity facilitates emotion regulation and its cultivation may reduce anger in post‐deployed military families.
... Research has found that children and adolescents low in trait self-control exhibit greater aggressive and delinquent behaviors (Krueger, Caspi, Moffitt, White, & Stouthamer-Loeber, 1996;Murphy & Eisenberg, 1997). Likewise, adults low in trait self-control respond to anger-provoking situations more aggressively (Hofmann et al., 2008;Jensen-Campbell, Knack, Waldrip, & Campbell, 2007;Kashdan, Goodman, Mallar, & DeWall, 2016;Tangney et al., 2004) and are more likely to engage in acts of violence (e.g., pushing and hitting; Larson, Vaughn, Salas-Wright, & Delisi, 2015) than are those high in this trait. Furthermore, a study on jail inmates found that those low in trait self-control were higher in verbal and physical aggression than were inmates high in self-control (Malouf et al., 2014). ...
People constantly experience a tug‐of‐war between their self‐control on one end and their temptations on the other. Although a great deal of research has examined such self‐control dilemmas, much of it has focused on the “push” of self‐control rather than the “pull” of temptations. To facilitate future work on this latter construct, we sought to create a taxonomy of temptations. Using a top‐down approach, we relied on the philosophical and historical concept of the seven deadly sins—gluttony, greed, lust, sloth, envy, pride, and wrath—to identify and define the most commonly experienced temptations. In support of this taxonomy, we review evidence for the role that self‐control plays in resisting each of these seven temptation domains, including work on trait self‐control and momentary exertions of self‐control. Where applicable, we identify areas where research is lacking and make suggestions for future work. Lastly, we discuss how this taxonomy offers researchers both theoretical and practical benefits.
... 31 However, studies using diary methodology in healthy individuals to capture angering events have reported that trait anger is at most modestly predictive of the day-to-day experience of anger. 31,32 An aspect of the study of anger highly relevant to the results of functional imaging studies is the wide range of stimuli that have been utilized as the anger condition. 19,21,22,24,33 Angry faces are the most common, either simply viewing or with an associated task. ...
... Although anger and aggression are often studied together (Gresham, Melvin, & Gullone, 2016), nonetheless these two factors are different aspects. Anger refers to the emotion one experiences (Kashdan, Goodman, Mallard, & DeWall, 2015), while aggression refers to the act (Wilkowski & Robinson, 2008/2007. Nonetheless, like aggression, anger also is a strong predictor for perpetration (Hein, Koka, & Hagger, 2015;Tanrikulu & Campbell, 2015); explicitly, the higher the anger level, the higher the likelihood of perpetration (Bosworth, Espelage, & Simon, 1999). ...
The purpose of this review was to present a comparative summary of literature of the risk and preventative factors related to school bullying (SB) and cyber-bullying (CB), while identifying research gaps.Literature on bullying appears to disagree whether CB should be considered as a different form of bullying or as a sub-type of SB. Researchers, in an attempt to understand bullying, examined in depth numerous risk and preventive factors. Based solely on previous research papers, fourteen risk and preventative factors related to SB and likewise to CB, were selected on the basis that are most commonly indicated as strong factors in preceding works; each factor was searched for in relation to SB and CB separately, allowing a comparison of how each factor relates to SB and likewise to CB. Findings present a comparative picture of the factors related to SB and CB and provide a direction in the area of factors for fellow researchers wishing to develop anti-bullying strategies in the future. As expected the present study found that some factors are similarly related to SB as to CB, and others differentiate. Details of findings, limitations and implications are further discussed.
... Agreeableness was positively related to selfreported anger when conscientiousness was low (Jensen-Campbell et al., 2007). By contrast, a EXPERIENCING ANGER IN A SOCIAL INTERACTION study on daily anger using diary methodology found no significant associations between personality traits and subjective anger intensity (Kashdan, Goodman, Mallard, & DeWall, 2016). ...
Although prior research has shown a relationship between the Big Five personality factors and trait anger, evidence that links these personality traits to the experience of state anger is rare. The current study investigated the effect of the Big Five personality traits on the state anger experience after a provocation in a staged social interaction and how status differences moderate these personality effects in an academic sample. In the equal status condition (N = 131, 56% female, aged 18 to 37) participants were provoked by a confederate; in the low status condition (N = 125, 55% female, aged 18 to 51) anger was instead provoked by the experimenter. In both conditions, individuals higher in neuroticism experienced more state anger after being provoked. In contrast to our hypotheses, no status effects or interaction effects between personality traits and status condition influenced the anger experience. Our findings illustrate the importance of neuroticism in understanding how people react to provocations in social situations, while status had no impact on the anger experience.
... Although anger and aggression are often studied together (Gresham, Melvin, & Gullone, 2016), nonetheless these two factors are different aspects. Anger refers to the emotion one experiences (Kashdan, Goodman, Mallard, & DeWall, 2015), while aggression refers to the act (Wilkowski & Robinson, 2008/2007. Nonetheless, like aggression, anger also is a strong predictor for perpetration (Hein, Koka, & Hagger, 2015;Tanrikulu & Campbell, 2015); explicitly, the higher the anger level, the higher the likelihood of perpetration (Bosworth, Espelage, & Simon, 1999). ...
... At the cognitive level, the potential threat (in this case, anger expression) triggers an immediate response of "stop, look, and listen" (69), disrupting the ongoing action. And it is already known that the main category that elicits anger in a daily basis is, in return, "other people, " which highlights that it is an emotion with an important social trigger (70). ...
Problems in inhibitory control are regarded in Psychology as a key problem associated with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). They, however, might not be primary deficits, but instead a consequence of inattention. At least two components have been identified and dissociated in studies in regards to inhibitory control: interference suppression, responsible for controlling interference by resisting irrelevant or misleading information, and response inhibition, referring to withholding a response or overriding an ongoing behavior. Poor error awareness and self-monitoring undermine an individual’s ability to inhibit inadequate responses and change course of action. In non-social contexts, an individual depends on his own cognition to regulate his mistakes. In social contexts, however, there are many social cues that should help that individual to perceive his mistakes and inhibit inadequate responses. The processes involved in perceiving and interpreting those social cues are arguably part of a self-protection system (SPS). Individuals with ADHD not only present impulsive behaviors in social contexts, but also have difficulty perceiving their inadequate responses and overriding ongoing actions toward more appropriate ones. In this paper, we discuss that those difficulties are arguably a consequence of an impaired SPS, due to visual attention deficits and subsequent failure in perceiving and recognizing accurately negative emotions in facial expressions, especially anger. We discuss evidence that children with ADHD exhibit problems in a series of components involved in the activation of that system and advocate that the inability to identify the anger expressed by others, and thus, not experiencing the fear response that should follow, is, ultimately, what prevents them from inhibiting the ongoing inappropriate behavior, since a potential threat is not registered. Getting involved in high-risk situations, such as reckless driving, could also be a consequence of not registering a threat and thus, not experiencing fear.
... Such moderator elements are evident in much of the subsequent research on aggression [6,7,8,9]. The specificity of situational triggers was exemplified in a daily diary study: The authors identified five categories of anger and aggression triggers, which, despite the inclusion of personality traits, captured the majority of variance in daily aggression and feelings of anger [10]. ...
Aggression is often construed as a unitary trait fully captured by the Buss-Perry Aggression Questionnaire (BPAQ). Our review of the literature questions that assumption in several respects. Instead of a top-down approach, we argue for a bottom-up conception based on the Dark Tetrad of personality, that is, narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. We highlight research showing that each member of the tetrad responds to different provocations. We conclude that the unitary trait conception of aggression has yielded more confusion than understanding. The term aggression should be reserved for outcomes, with many possible trait x situation predictors. Future research should continue the investigation of moderators as well as cognitive mediators to clarify the triggering of aggression in the individual tetrad members.
... Attentional awareness predicted lower anger, hostility, and aggression, and this association was partially accounted for by general rumination in both undergraduates and community meditators (Borders et al. 2010). In contrast, a recent study of daily anger episodes found that the Accept without Judgment subscale of the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills (now part of the Nonjudging subscale of the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire) was associated with lower anger, difficulties controlling anger, and regret, but also found that Acting with Awareness was not associated with anger or aggressive responses (Kashdan et al. 2016). Another study used the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) (Baer et al. 2006), a multidimensional measure of mindfulness. ...
Trait mindfulness, or the capacity for nonjudgmental, present-centered attention, predicts lower aggression in cross-sectional samples, an effect mediated by reduced anger rumination. Experimental work also implicates state mindfulness (i.e., fluctuations around one’s typical mindfulness) in aggression. Despite evidence that both trait and state mindfulness predict lower aggression, their relative impact and their mechanisms remain unclear. Higher trait mindfulness and state increases in mindfulness facets may reduce aggression-related outcomes by (1) limiting the intensity of anger, or (2) limiting rumination on anger experiences. The present study tests two hypotheses: first, that both trait and state mindfulness contribute unique variance to lower aggressiveness, and second, that the impact of both trait and state mindfulness on aggressiveness will be uniquely partially mediated by both anger intensity and anger rumination. Eighty-six participants completed trait measures of mindfulness, anger intensity, and anger rumination, and then completed diaries for 35 days assessing mindfulness, anger intensity, anger rumination, anger expression, and self-reported and behavioral aggressiveness. Using multilevel zero-inflated regression, we examined unique contributions of trait and state mindfulness facets to daily anger expression and aggressiveness. We also examined the mediating roles of anger intensity and anger rumination at both trait and state levels. Mindfulness facets predicted anger expression and aggressiveness indirectly through anger rumination after controlling for indirect pathways through anger intensity. Individuals with high or fluctuating aggression may benefit from mindfulness training to reduce both intensity of and rumination on anger.
... ER permits flexibility in emotional responding in accord with one's momentary as well as one's longer term goals in any given situation. For instance, ER can be useful to reduce the intensity and/or the duration of negative emotions, such as anger (Kashdan et al., 2015) or sadness (Millgram et al., 2015). ER comprises a set of different strategies, including for instance attentional deployment, in which the attention is shifted away or towards emotional aspects of a stimulus or situation (Manera et al., 2014), cognitive reappraisal, in which people change the way they think about a stimulus or situation in order to reduce negative feelings (e.g., Gross, 1998;Ochsner et al., 2002), and expressive suppression, in which people hide their emotions so that someone watching them would not know what they are feeling (Gross and Levenson, 1993;Lévesque et al., 2003). ...
Objective: At present emotional experience and implicit emotion regulation (IER) abilities are mainly assessed though self-reports, which are subjected to several biases. The aim of the present studies was to validate the Clock’N test, a recently developed time estimation task employing emotional priming to assess implicitly emotional reactivity and IER.
Methods: In Study 1, the Clock’N test was administered to 150 healthy participants with different age, laterality and gender, in order to ascertain whether these factors affected the test results. In phase 1 participant were asked to judge the duration of seven sounds. In phase 2, before judging the duration of the same sounds, participants were presented with short arousing video-clip used as emotional priming stimuli. Time warp was calculated as the difference in time estimation between phase 2 and phase 1, and used to assess how emotions affected subjective time estimations. In study 2, a representative sample was selected to provide normative scores to be employed to assess emotional reactivity (Score 1) and IER (Score 2), and to calculate statistical cutoffs, based on the 10th and 90th score distribution percentiles.
Results: Converging with previous findings, the results of study 1 suggested that the Clock’N test can be employed to assess both emotional reactivity, as indexed by an initial time underestimation, and IER, as indexed by a progressive shift to time overestimation. No effects of gender, age and laterality were found.
Conclusions: These results suggest that the Clock’N test is adapted to assess emotional reactivity and IER. After collection of data on the test discriminant and convergent validity, this test may be employed to assess deficits in these abilities in different clinical populations.
... Although stress and emotions with negative valence (especially anxiety) are related to withdrawal tendencies (Mansell et al. 2008), hostility is clearly distinguishable by the lack of agreeableness and prosocial tendencies (Watson and Clark 1992) and an initiation of fight responses (motivational approach tendencies) on different psychological and physiological levels (Archer 1991(Archer , 2006Harmon-Jones 2003;Carver and Harmon-Jones 2009). A recent finding by Kashdan et al. (2015) suggests that the motivational tendencies associated with anger are distinct from other negative emotions. The authors describe five superordinate anger triggers (interpersonal triggers, psychological, and physical stress, intrapersonal demands and environmental triggers) in everyday life situations. ...
The ability to detect conspecifics that represent a potential harm for an individual represents a high survival benefit. Humans communicate socially relevant information using all sensory modalities, including the chemosensory systems. In study 1, we investigated whether the body odor of a stranger with the intention to harm serves as a chemosignal of aggression. Sixteen healthy male participants donated their body odor while engaging in a boxing session characterized by aggression-induction methods (chemosignal of aggression) and while performing an ergometer session (exercise chemosignal). Self-reports on aggression-related physical activity, motivation to harm and angry emotions selectively increased after aggression induction. In study 2, we examined whether receivers smelling such chemosignals experience emotional contagion (e.g., anger) or emotional reciprocity (e.g., anxiety). The aggression and exercise chemosignals were therefore presented to 22 healthy normosmic participants in a double-blind, randomized exposure during which affective/cognitive processing was examined (i.e., emotion recognition task, emotional stroop task). Behavioral results indicate that chemosignals of aggression induce an affective/cognitive modulation compatible with an anxiety reaction in the recipients. These findings are discussed in light of mechanisms of emotional reciprocity as a way to convey not only affective but also motivational information via chemosensory signals in humans.
Anger issues sebagai permasalahan dalam regulasi emosi kerap dialami oleh taruna dari institusi kemiliteran di Indonesia. Implementasi anger issues di kalangan taruna dewasa ini berupa kasus penganiayaan kepada junior. Korps Marinir diketahui sebagai penjurusan di Akademi Angkatan Laut yang memiliki intensitas latihan fisik tertinggi dan satu-satunya korps yang mengikuti Pendidikan Komando (Dikko). Penelitian bertujuan mengetahui gambaran anger issues, strategi koping stres, dan menguraikan risiko PTSD pada taruna Korps Marinir Akademi Angkatan Laut pasca menempuh Pendidikan Komando. Penelitian menggunakan pendekatan kualitatif dengan metode studi kasus intrinsik. Wawancara mendalam dan kuesioner skrining PTSD sebagai metode pengambilan data. Pengorganisasian dan analisis data menggunakan analisis tematik dengan pendekatan theory driven. Triangulasi data menggunakan member check. Gambaran anger issues dan strategi koping kedua subjek selama Dikko berbeda, dan keduanya mengalami trauma pasca Dikko namun dengan derajat keparahan yang berbeda. Derajat keparahan trauma yang dialami bergantung pada tingkat resiliensi atau faktor protektif individu.
Anger in young people is on the increase worldwide and effective anger treatment services are in demand. However, the lack of research on the construct of anger and little evidence-based practice makes it difficult to ascertain the best service for these angry young people. Moreover, there is a lack of extensive evidence and qualitative research in the combination of psychoeducation and positive psychology interventions in anger management programmes for young people. Therefore, this chapter will summarise a phenomenological study of an existing psychoeducational anger management programme in the UK and discuss its findings. This chapter will present anger and positive psychology in the context of developing an effective anger management programme and provide a simple anger management strategy to use as a foundation for developing anger management programmes in schools.
Background
While substantial research exists into the personal and social effects of anger, relatively little illuminates young men's lived experiences with this emotion. Much of this literature focuses on women's experiences, while few studies have been conducted by clinical practitioners.
Research Aim
The aim of this research was to explore the lived experience of problematic anger in young men from a phenomenological perspective. It sought to provide insights into what angers young men, how anger affects them psychologically, emotionally and physiologically, and what they do when they experience anger.
Method
Qualitative phenomenological research was conducted using semi‐structured interviews with a sample of six male participants between the ages of 20 and 25 years. The accounts were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA).
Key Findings
Three main themes were identified. Theme one explores how participants’ anger impacts both their sense of agency and their physical sensations. Theme two illuminated how anger affects participants’ changing self‐concept, their loss of awareness and control and sense of responsibility for actions taken. Theme three highlighted how participants attempt to regain composure.
Conclusion
This study addresses the paucity of research into the lived experiences of anger in young men. The findings suggest that anger is an intensely dynamic experience that unfolds with a cumulative impact on young men's ability to retain control over their sense of self, as experienced in time, space, their bodies and relationally.
Recent studies have begun to document the diversity of ways people regulate their emotions. However, one unanswered question is why people regulate their emotions as they do in everyday life. In the present research, we examined how social context and goals influence strategy selection in daily high points and low points. As expected, suppression was particularly tied to social features of context: it was used more when others were present, especially non-close partners, and when people had instrumental goals, especially more interpersonal ones (e.g., avoid conflict). Distraction and reappraisal were used more when regulating for hedonic reasons (e.g., to feel better), but these strategies were also linked to certain instrumental goals (e.g., getting work done). When contra-hedonic regulation occurred, it primarily took the form of dampening positive emotion during high points. Suppression was more likely to be used for contra-hedonic regulation, whereas reappraisal and distraction were used more for pro-hedonic regulation. Overall, these findings highlight the social nature of emotion regulation and underscore the importance of examining regulation in both positive and negative contexts.
This chapter addresses the theoretical, empirical, and practical issues surrounding the temperature–aggression hypothesis. A brief history of the temperature–aggression hypothesis and paradox involving violence and lethargy is described in the chapter. It outlines the major issues and theories surrounding heat effects and provides an integrated model of aggression. In correlation studies of the temperature–aggression hypothesis, there may be complexities that artificially give rise to strong heat effects. The existential question in the chapter refers to whether there is a true direct causal effect of hot temperatures on aggression. Negative affect escape theory focuses on the current state of the individual and their behavioral motives. Two theories that focus on the influence of environmental factors on aggressive cognitions and behaviors are Bandura's groundbreaking social learning theory (SLT) and Berkowitz's contemporary cognitive neoassociation theory (CNT) of emotion. The temperature–aggression hypothesis refers to the theoretical statement that uncomfortable temperatures cause increases in aggressive motivation and (under the right conditions) in aggressive behavior. The General Affective Aggression model theory states that heat effects are both direct and indirect.
Mindfulness training reduces anger and aggression, but the mechanisms of these effects are unclear. Mindfulness may reduce anger expression and hostility via reductions in anger rumination, a process of thinking repetitively about angry episodes that increases anger. Previous research supports this theory but used measures of general rumination and assessed only the present-centered awareness component of mindfulness. The present study investigated associations between various aspects of mindfulness, anger rumination, and components of aggression.
The present study used self-report measures of these constructs in a cross-sectional sample of 823 students.
Structural equation modeling revealed that anger rumination accounts for a significant component of the relationship between mindfulness and aggression, with the largest effect sizes demonstrated for the nonjudgment of inner experiences facet of mindfulness.
Nonjudgment and present-centered awareness may influence aggression via reduced anger rumination. The importance of examining mindfulness as a multidimensional construct is discussed.
© 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The transdiagnostic approach states that there are key cognitive and behavioral processes responsible for maintaining symptoms and these are shared across psychological disorders (Harvey, Watkins, Mansell, & Shafran, 2004). The first goal of this article is to justify the potential utility of a transdiagnostic perspective for theory, research and treatment using empirical evidence and clinical vignettes. We then take as an example one set of cognitive processes-attentional processes-to illustrate the approach. Evidence for three attentional processes is provided: vigilance to external concern-related stimuli; vigilance to internal concern-related stimuli (self-focused attention) and attentional avoidance. It is concluded that each of these attentional processes are transdiagnostic. We then discuss three possible resolutions to the question: How can a transdiagnostic perspective be valid when the different psychological disorders present so differently? The three proposals are: (1) variations in idiosyncratic current concerns; (2) variations in the degree of shared processes and (3) distinct processes for specific disorders or groups of disorders. The role of a transdiagnostic approach in supporting the development and testing of theories of psychopathology is highlighted and the need for future studies that incorporate multiple patient groups is discussed.
The negative affect that results from negative feedback is a substantial, proximal cause of aggression. People high in maladaptive perfectionism, the tendency to focus on the discrepancy between one's standards and performance, are characterized by an exaggerated negative affective response to negative feedback. This exacerbated affective response to failure may then dispose them to hurt others and themselves as aggression and self-harm are often perceived as a means to regulate negative affect. In Study 1, we demonstrated that maladaptive perfectionism was linked to greater aggressive behavior towards others after receiving negative feedback. Suggesting the presence of an emotion regulation strategy, this effect was mediated by the motivation to use aggression to improve mood. In Study 2, maladaptive perfectionism was linked to self-harm, an effect exacerbated by negative feedback and mediated by negative affect. These findings suggest that maladaptive perfectionists are at risk for greater harm towards others and the self because negative feedback has a stronger affective impact and harming others and the self is perceived a means to alleviate this aversive state. Aggr. Behav. 9999:XX–XX, 2014. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Previous research has shown that individual differences in negative emotion differentiation may play a prominent role in well-being. Yet, many basic questions about negative emotion differentiation remain unanswered, including how it relates and overlaps with related and known dimensions of individual differences and what its possible underlying processes are. To answer these questions, in the current article we present three correlational studies that chart the nomological network of individual differences in negative emotion differentiation in terms of personality, difficulties in identifying and describing feelings, and several indicators of well-being, propose a novel paradigm to assess it in the lab, and explore relationships with a possible underlying mechanism in terms of the motivation to approach or avoid emotions. The results affirm consistent relations between negative emotion differentiation and indicators of adjustment like negative affect, self-esteem, neuroticism, depression and meta-knowledge about one's emotions, and show how it is related to the motivation to experience affective states.
Syndromal classification is a well-developed diagnostic system but has failed to deliver on its promise of the identification of functional pathological processes. Functional analysis is tightly connected to treatment but has failed to develop testable, replicable classification systems. Functional diagnostic dimensions are suggested as a way to develop the functional classification approach, and experiential avoidance is described as 1 such dimension. A wide range of research is reviewed showing that many forms of psychopathology can be conceptualized as unhealthy efforts to escape and avoid emotions, thoughts, memories, and other private experiences. It is argued that experiential avoidance, as a functional diagnostic dimension, has the potential to integrate the efforts and findings of researchers from a wide variety of theoretical paradigms, research interests, and clinical domains and to lead to testable new approaches to the analysis and treatment of behavioral disorders. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Explored the triggers, experience, expression, and outcome of anger of 747 American and Russian Ss who provided reports about recent anger experiences. In both countries anger was generally triggered at home, during the afternoon or evening, and across all days of the week by the unexpected actions of a liked or loved person. It was perceived as different from annoyance in terms of a lower frequency of occurrence, greater intensity, and longer duration. Anger was typically described as a verbal event involving arguing, sarcasm, or complaining. Although similarities across Russian and American men and women were noted, Russians were more likely to experience anger in a public place and to have it triggered by an uncontrollable event. Americans, and men, more often reported associated physical actions such as hitting a person or destroying an object. A number of other sex differences were found. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Individuals differ considerably in their emotion experience. Some experience emotions in a highly differentiated manner, clearly distinguishing among a variety of negative and positive discrete emotions. Others experience emotions in a relatively undifferentiated manner, treating a range of like-valence terms as interchangeable. Drawing on self-regulation theory, we hypothesised that indivi-duals with highly differentiated emotion experience should be better able to regulate emotions than individuals with poorly differentiated emotion experience. In particular, we hypothesised that emotion differentiation and emotion regulation would be positively related in the context of intense negative emotions, where the press for emotion regulation is generally greatest. To test this hypothesis, parti-cipants' negative and positive emotion differentiation was assessed using a 14-day diary protocol. Participants' regulation of negative and positive emotions was assessed using laboratory measures. As predicted, negative emotion differentiation was positively related to the frequency of negative emotion regulation, particularly at higher levels of emotional intensity.
Increasingly, social and personality psychologists are conducting studies in which data are collected simultaneously at multiple levels, with hypotheses concerning effects that involve multiple levels of analysis. In studies of naturally occurring social interaction, data describing people and their social interactions are collected simultaneously. This article discuses how to analyze such data using random coefficient modeling. Analyzing data describing day-to-day social interaction is used to illustrate the analysis of event-contingent data (when specific events trigger or organize data collection), and analyzing data describing reactions to daily events is used to illustrate the analysis of interval-contingent data (when data are collected at intervals). Different analytic strategies are presented, the shortcomings of ordinary least squares analyses are described, and the use of multilevel random coefficient modeling is discussed in detail. Different modeling techniques, the specifics of formulating and testing hypotheses, and the differences between fixed and random effects are also considered.
Two studies examined individual and environmental forces that affect engagement in prosocial behavior. Self-determination theory was used to derive a model in which autonomy orientation and autonomy support predicted satisfaction of three core psychological needs, which in turn led to engagement in prosocial activities. In Study 1, college students reported their engagement in various prosocial activities, and completed measures of autonomy orientation, parental autonomy support, and general need satisfaction. In Study 2, volunteer workers completed measures of autonomy orientation, work autonomy support and need satisfaction at work. The number of volunteered hours indicated the amount of prosocial engagement. Results across the studies showed that autonomy orientation was strongly related to engagement in prosocial behavior, while autonomy support was modestly related. Need satisfaction partially mediated the effect of autonomy orientation, and fully mediated the effect of autonomy support. Interestingly, autonomy support predicted lower volunteer turnover. Implications for how prosocial behavior can be motivated are discussed.
Some people are adept at using discrete emotion categories (anxious, angry, sad) to capture their felt experience; other people merely communicate how good or bad they feel. We theorized that people who are better at describing their emotions might be less likely to self-medicate with alcohol. During a 3-week period, 106 underage social drinkers used handheld computers to self-monitor alcohol intake. From participants' reported experiences during random prompts, we created an individual difference measure of emotion differentiation. Results from a 30-day timeline follow-back revealed that people with intense negative emotions consumed less alcohol if they were better at describing emotions and less reliant on global descriptions. Results from ecological momentary assessment procedures revealed that people with intense negative emotions prior to drinking episodes consumed less alcohol if they were better at describing emotions. These findings provide support for a novel methodology and dimension for understanding the influence of emotions on substance-use patterns.
Eleven predictions derived from the recalibrational theory of anger were tested. This theory proposes that anger is produced by a neurocognitive program engineered by natural selection to use bargaining tactics to resolve conflicts of interest in favor of the angry individual. The program is designed to orchestrate two interpersonal negotiating tactics (conditionally inflicting costs or conditionally withholding benefits) to incentivize the target of the anger to place greater weight on the welfare of the angry individual. Individuals with enhanced abilities to inflict costs (e.g., stronger individuals) or to confer benefits (e.g., attractive individuals) have a better bargaining position in conflicts; hence, it was predicted that such individuals will be more prone to anger, prevail more in conflicts of interest, and consider themselves entitled to better treatment. These predictions were confirmed. Consistent with an evolutionary analysis, the effect of strength on anger was greater for men and the effect of attractiveness on anger was greater for women. Also as predicted, stronger men had a greater history of fighting than weaker men, and more strongly endorsed the efficacy of force to resolve conflicts--both in interpersonal and international conflicts. The fact that stronger men favored greater use of military force in international conflicts provides evidence that the internal logic of the anger program reflects the ancestral payoffs characteristic of a small-scale social world rather than rational assessments of modern payoffs in large populations.
The authors review a range of evidence concerning the motivational underpinnings of anger as an affect, with particular reference to the relationship between anger and anxiety or fear. The evidence supports the view that anger relates to an appetitive or approach motivational system, whereas anxiety relates to an aversive or avoidance motivational system. This evidence appears to have 2 implications. One implication concerns the nature of anterior cortical asymmetry effects. The evidence suggests that such asymmetry reflects direction of motivational engagement (approach vs. withdrawal) rather than affective valence. The other implication concerns the idea that affects form a purely positive dimension and a purely negative dimension, which reflect the operation of appetitive and aversive motivational systems, respectively. The evidence reviewed does not support that view. The evidence is, however, consistent with a discrete-emotions view (which does not rely on dimensionality) and with an alternative dimensional approach.
I assessed the effects of internal-external attributional style and amount of unsolvable problems on subsequent task performance. Undergraduate subjects were divided according to their attributional style for bad events into internal, nondefined, and external attributors and were exposed to either one, four, or no unsolvable problems. Following exposure to a single unsolvable problem, internal attributors exhibited greater frustration and hostility and better performance in a subsequent cognitive task than did external attributors. Following exposure to four unsolvable problems, internal attributors exhibited stronger feelings of incompetence and a decrease in performance compared with external attributors. The results are discussed in terms of Wortman and Brehm's (1975) approach to reactance and helplessness.
The next 3 articles in this issue use multilevel statistical procedures to analyze data collected in daily process studies of (a) stress and coping, (b) binge eating, and (c) chronic pain experience. Important differences in the methods and procedures of these studies illustrate the many options available to investigators and data analysts. This article serves as a preface to help readers who are new to these studies' methodology appreciate their novel contributions to the literature in consulting and clinical psychology. Four frequently asked questions are addressed concerning the design of daily process studies, the distinctive meaning of a within-person finding, the possibility that self-monitoring studies are measurement reactive, and complexities in the use of multilevel statistical procedures for analyzing person-day data sets.
Well-being is a complex construct that concerns optimal experience and functioning. Current research on well-being has been derived from two general perspectives: the hedonic approach, which focuses on happiness and defines well-being in terms of pleasure attainment and pain avoidance; and the eudaimonic approach, which focuses on meaning and self-realization and defines well-being in terms of the degree to which a person is fully functioning. These two views have given rise to different research foci and a body of knowledge that is in some areas divergent and in others complementary. New methodological developments concerning multilevel modeling and construct comparisons are also allowing researchers to formulate new questions for the field. This review considers research from both perspectives concerning the nature of well-being, its antecedents, and its stability across time and culture.
Human beings can be proactive and engaged or, alternatively, passive and alienated, largely as a function of the social conditions in which they develop and function. Accordingly, research guided by self-determination theory has focused on the social-contextual conditions that facilitate versus forestall the natural processes of self-motivation and healthy psychological development. Specifically, factors have been examined that enhance versus undermine intrinsic motivation, self-regulation, and well-being. The findings have led to the postulate of three innate psychological needs--competence, autonomy, and relatedness--which when satisfied yield enhanced self-motivation and mental health and when thwarted lead to diminished motivation and well-being. Also considered is the significance of these psychological needs and processes within domains such as health care, education, work, sport, religion, and psychotherapy.
Research bearing on several popular conceptions of the major determinants of anger arousal indicates that the particular appraisals often identified as causes of anger frequently only serve to affect the intensity of the anger that is generated. Research into effects of physical pain or other physically unpleasant conditions or involving social stresses suggests that decidedly aversive conditions are a major spur to anger. Experiments are also reviewed showing that anger-related muscular movements can also lead to anger-related feelings, memories, cognitions, and autonomic responses. Alternative explanations for the findings are discussed. The authors urge emotion theorists to widen their methodology and analyses so that they give careful, detailed attention to the many different factors that can influence anger.
Being able to carefully perceive and distinguish the rich complexity in emotional experiences is a key component of psychological interventions. We review research in clinical, social, and health psychology that offers insights into the adaptive value of putting feelings into words with a high degree of complexity (i.e., emotion differentiation or emotional granularity). According to recent research, upon experiencing intense distress, individuals who experience their emotions with more granularity are less likely to resort to maladaptive self-regulatory strategies such as binge drinking, aggression, and self-injurious behavior; show less neural reactivity to rejection; and experience less severe anxiety and depressive disorders. These findings shed light on how negative emotions and stressful experiences can be transformed by people’s emotion-differentiation skill. Besides basic research suggesting that emotion differentiation is an important developmental process, evidence suggests that interventions designed to improve emotion differentiation can both reduce psychological problems and increase various strands of well-being.
Anger is a commonly experienced emotion, although marked individual differences in the expression of anger are observed. Basic dimensions of personality (e.g., Big Five traits) have been shown to predict the experience of trait anger; however, little work has addressed the personality correlates of broader conceptualisations of trait anger (e.g., inward or outward expressions). Additionally, while some recent work has suggested that basic personality traits may show interactive influences on anger expression this work has yet to be independently confirmed. In a large sample of adults we examined, firstly, how Big Five traits associated with several components of anger as measured by the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory. Secondly, we examined whether these associations were further qualified by interactions between Big Five traits. Results indicated neuroticism and, to a lesser extent, (low) agreeableness, were the traits most associated with components of trait anger. Conscientiousness and extraversion were also noted to show links to more focal components of anger. Moderation was observed: conscientiousness moderated neuroticism’s relationship with anger control, and agreeableness and conscientiousness, in a three-way interaction, moderated neuroticism’s relationship with trait anger. These observations help to further clarify the role of Big Five personality traits as a foundation for the experiences of anger, demonstrating how anger style varies across personality configuration.
Three studies explored the associations among style of anger expression, emotional expressivity, Big Five personality traits, somatic complaints, and self-reported health behaviors among undergraduate and community-residing participants. Unlike measures of emotional expressivity, which tend to be most strongly related to Extraversion, anger-in and anger-out primarily were associated with Neuroticism and Agreeableness, respectively. Anger-in was positively related to somatic complaints but failed to predict symptoms after controlling for Neuroticism. Anger-out was positively associated with both somatic complaints and self-reported health behaviors, even after controlling for Neuroticism and Agreeableness. Measures of emotional expressivity provided further information regarding style of anger expression. Anger-in was associated with a general tendency to be emotionally inexpressive, whereas anger-out was more specifically related to the expression of angry emotions.
This article presents a methodological critique of the predominant research paradigms in modern social psychology, particularly social cognition, taking the approach of Solomon Asch as a more appropriate model. The critique has 2 parts. First, the dominant model of science in the field is appropriate only for a well-developed science, in which basic, real-world phenomena have been identified, important invariances in these phenomena have been documented, and appropriate model systems that capture the essence of these phenomena have been developed. These requirements are not met for most of the phenomena under study in social psychology. Second, the model of science in use is a caricature of the actual scientific process in well-developed sciences such as biology. Such research is often not model or even hypothesis driven, but rather relies on “informed curiosity” to motivate research. Descriptive studies are considered important and make up a substantial part of the literature, and there is less exclusive reliance on experiment. The two parts of the critique are documented by analysis of articles in appropriate psychology and biology journals. The author acknowledges that important and high quality work is currently being done in social psychology, but believes that the field has maladaptively narrowed the range of the phenomena and methodological approaches that it deems acceptable or optimal.
Research from numerous corners of psychological inquiry suggests that self-assessments of skill and character are often flawed in substantive and systematic ways. We review empirical findings on the imperfect nature of self-assessment and discuss implications for three real-world domains: health, education, and the workplace.
In general, people's self-views hold only a tenuous to modest relationship with their actual behavior and performance. The correlation between self-ratings of skill and actual performance in many domains is moderate to meager—indeed, at times, other people's predictions of a person's outcomes prove more accurate than that person's self-predictions. In addition, people overrate themselves. On average, people say that they are “above average” in skill (a conclusion that defies statistical possibility), overestimate the likelihood that they will engage in desirable behaviors and achieve favorable outcomes, furnish overly optimistic estimates of when they will complete future projects, and reach judgments with too much confidence. Several psychological processes conspire to produce flawed self-assessments.
Research focusing on health echoes these findings. People are unrealistically optimistic about their own health risks compared with those of other people. They also overestimate how distinctive their opinions and preferences (e.g., discomfort with alcohol) are among their peers—a misperception that can have a deleterious impact on their health. Unable to anticipate how they would respond to emotion-laden situations, they mispredict the preferences of patients when asked to step in and make treatment decisions for them. Guided by mistaken but seemingly plausible theories of health and disease, people misdiagnose themselves—a phenomenon that can have severe consequences for their health and longevity.
Similarly, research in education finds that students' assessments of their performance tend to agree only moderately with those of their teachers and mentors. Students seem largely unable to assess how well or poorly they have comprehended material they have just read. They also tend to be overconfident in newly learned skills, at times because the common educational practice of massed training appears to promote rapid acquisition of skill—as well as self-confidence—but not necessarily the retention of skill. Several interventions, however, can be introduced to prompt students to evaluate their skill and learning more accurately.
In the workplace, flawed self-assessments arise all the way up the corporate ladder. Employees tend to overestimate their skill, making it difficult to give meaningful feedback. CEOs also display overconfidence in their judgments, particularly when stepping into new markets or novel projects—for example, proposing acquisitions that hurt, rather then help, the price of their company's stock. We discuss several interventions aimed at circumventing the consequences of such flawed assessments; these include training people to routinely make cognitive repairs correcting for biased self-assessments and requiring people to justify their decisions in front of their peers.
The act of self-assessment is an intrinsically difficult task, and we enumerate several obstacles that prevent people from reaching truthful self-impressions. We also propose that researchers and practitioners should recognize self-assessment as a coherent and unified area of study spanning many subdisciplines of psychology and beyond. Finally, we suggest that policymakers and other people who makes real-world assessments should be wary of self-assessments of skill, expertise, and knowledge, and should consider ways of repairing self-assessments that may be flawed.
It was predicted that negative affect associated with one component of air pollution (malodor) reduces attraction toward both similar and dissimilar strangers. In one experiment, 27 subjects rated attitudinally similar or dissimilar strangers while confined in a room whose atmosphere was ambient (no-odor control) or polluted by ammonium sulfide. Contrary to predictions, similar strangers elicited greatest liking in the polluted atmosphere. It was suggested that air pollution had increased attraction for another who might be experiencing the same disagreeable situation (i.e., “shared stress”). In a second experiment, this suggestion was examined by assuring subjects that they were alone and would not meet the similar or dissimilar person they rated. As predicted, exposure to either ammonium sulfide or butyric acid combined additively with attitudinal dissimilarity to depress liking, mood-affect, time spent in the setting, and ratings of the environment. These results were viewed as consistent with the reinforcement-affect model of attraction, but it was cautioned that the effects of air pollution may depend on social factors, such as shared stress, and dosage level of the pollutant.
a b s t r a c t Given the many negative consequences of unrestrained anger, understanding successful anger regulation is of critical importance. The present study investigated the effects of two common emotion regulation strategies, cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, on self-reported anger and blood pressure. Fifty undergraduate women were insulted by a fictitious participant. Those high in trait reappraisal showed attenuated anger and blood pressure in response to the provocation. These relationships per-sisted even when controlling for negative emotionality. The results suggest that changing the habitual way in which individuals respond to anger-inducing events could be an important component of anger regulation interventions.
Consistent with the cognitive-neoassociationistic conception of anger and emotional aggression, a wide variety of studies with animal as well as human subjects demonstrate that pain often gives rise to an inclination to hurt an available target, and also, at the human level, that people in pain are apt to be angry. However, and also in accord with the present formulation, these primitive angry/aggressive reactions can be suppressed, intensified, or modified by cognitive processes.
While most books on missing data focus on applying sophisticated statistical techniques to deal with the problem after it has occurred, this volume provides a methodology for the control and prevention of missing data. In clear, nontechnical language, the authors help the reader understand the different types of missing data and their implications for the reliability, validity, and generalizability of a study’s conclusions. They provide practical recommendations for designing studies that decrease the likelihood of missing data, and for addressing this important issue when reporting study results. When statistical remedies are needed--such as deletion procedures, augmentation methods, and single imputation and multiple imputation procedures--the book also explains how to make sound decisions about their use. Patrick E. McKnight's website offers a periodically updated annotated bibliography on missing data and links to other Web resources that address missing data.
Although many studies of personality and aggression focus on multidimensional traits and higher order personality disorders (e.g., psychopathy), lower order, unidimensional traits may provide more precision in identifying specific aspects of personality that relate to aggression. The current study includes a comprehensive measurement of lower order personality traits in relation to three forms of aggression: reactive, proactive, and relational. Traits related to interpersonal antagonism and impulsivity, especially impulsive behavior in the context of negative affect, were consistently related to aggression across multiple indices. These findings suggest that certain lower order traits are of critical importance to understanding who engages in aggressive behavior and why this behavior occurs.
In contrast to most recent studies of human aggression, multiple measures of naturally occurring aggressive behavior were examined in a realistic and involving setting. Consistent with attributional formulations, it was found that aggression increased in accord with attributions of blame, and that more blame was attributed to another in response to inadequately justified thwartings than to adequately justified thwartings. As anticipated, anger, other-directed attributions of blame, and other-directed aggression were greatest in response to unjustified (illegitimate) thwartings. Justified (legitimate) thwartings produced intermediate anger and intermediate levels of blame and aggression internally and externally. Self-caused (internal) thwartings, ostensibly caused neither by the other's disposition nor by situational factors, produced the least anger and other-directed aggression but the most self-blame/self-aggression. In addition, unexpected thwartings produced independently more anger than did expected thwartings, and high-drive thwartings produced independently less other-directed aggression than did low-drive thwartings. The results are discussed with reference to both the need and the potential for studies of human aggression which employ more ecologically valid settings and measures of aggressive behavior.
Anger is commonly associated with aggression. Inefficient anger-coping strategies increase negative affect and deplete the regulatory resources needed to control aggressive impulses. Factors linked with better emotion regulation may then weaken the relationship between anger and aggression. The current work explored one factor associated with emotion regulation-differentiating one's emotions into discrete categories-that may buffer angry people from aggression. Three diary studies (N = 628) tested the hypothesis that emotion differentiation would weaken the relationship between anger and aggression. In Study 1, participants high in emotion differentiation reported less daily aggressive tendencies when angry, compared to low differentiators. In Study 2, compared to low differentiators, high differentiators reported less frequent provocation in daily life and less daily aggression in response to being provoked and feeling intense anger. Study 3 showed that high daily emotional control mediated the interactive effect of emotion differentiation and anger on aggression. These results highlight the importance of considering how angry people differentiate their emotions in predicting their aggressive responses to anger.
This special issue of Journal of Personality, composed of eight original articles, attends to the intersection of intrapersonal and interpersonal processes. Articles adopt a contextual approach to personality with attention to the need to belong (and the lack thereof), self-presentation concerns and styles, sexuality, curiosity, self-regulatory strength and strategies, and dynamic methodologies and analyses to study people within relationships. In this introduction, we offer challenges and aspirational goals for personality science. In particular, we discuss the importance of context when conceptualizing and studying personality, the seduction of innovative methodologies and analytic procedures, and the value of focusing on people and heterogeneity in groups instead of simply variables. We hope that this collection of articles deepens personality science and reminds readers that to truly understand human beings, they cannot be divorced from their social milieu.
The escalating costs of health care and other recent trends have made health care decisions of great societal import, with decision-making responsibility often being transferred from practitioners to health economists, health plans, and insurers. Health care decision making increasingly is guided by evidence that a treatment is efficacious, effective–disseminable, cost-effective, and scientifically plausible. Under these conditions of heightened cost concerns and institutional–economic decision making, psychologists are losing the opportunity to play a leadership role in mental and behavioral health care: Other types of practitioners are providing an increasing proportion of delivered treatment, and the use of psychiatric medication has increased dramatically relative to the provision of psychological interventions.
Research has shown that numerous psychological interventions are efficacious, effective, and cost-effective. However, these interventions are used infrequently with patients who would benefit from them, in part because clinical psychologists have not made a convincing case for the use of these interventions (e.g., by supplying the data that decision makers need to support implementation of such interventions) and because clinical psychologists do not themselves use these interventions even when given the opportunity to do so.
Clinical psychologists' failure to achieve a more significant impact on clinical and public health may be traced to their deep ambivalence about the role of science and their lack of adequate science training, which leads them to value personal clinical experience over research evidence, use assessment practices that have dubious psychometric support, and not use the interventions for which there is the strongest evidence of efficacy. Clinical psychology resembles medicine at a point in its history when practitioners were operating in a largely prescientific manner. Prior to the scientific reform of medicine in the early 1900s, physicians typically shared the attitudes of many of today's clinical psychologists, such as valuing personal experience over scientific research. Medicine was reformed, in large part, by a principled effort by the American Medical Association to increase the science base of medical school education. Substantial evidence shows that many clinical psychology doctoral training programs, especially PsyD and for-profit programs, do not uphold high standards for graduate admission, have high student–faculty ratios, deemphasize science in their training, and produce students who fail to apply or generate scientific knowledge.
A promising strategy for improving the quality and clinical and public health impact of clinical psychology is through a new accreditation system that demands high-quality science training as a central feature of doctoral training in clinical psychology. Just as strengthening training standards in medicine markedly enhanced the quality of health care, improved training standards in clinical psychology will enhance health and mental health care. Such a system will (a) allow the public and employers to identify scientifically trained psychologists; (b) stigmatize ascientific training programs and practitioners; (c) produce aspirational effects, thereby enhancing training quality generally; and (d) help accredited programs improve their training in the application and generation of science. These effects should enhance the generation, application, and dissemination of experimentally supported interventions, thereby improving clinical and public health. Experimentally based treatments not only are highly effective but also are cost-effective relative to other interventions; therefore, they could help control spiraling health care costs. The new Psychological Clinical Science Accreditation System (PCSAS) is intended to accredit clinical psychology training programs that offer high-quality science-centered education and training, producing graduates who are successful in generating and applying scientific knowledge. Psychologists, universities, and other stakeholders should vigorously support this new accreditation system as the surest route to a scientifically principled clinical psychology that can powerfully benefit clinical and public health.
The study followed from the idea that neuroticism captures hot or facilitative vulnerabilities related to anger and aggression, whereas agreeableness captures cool or inhibitory processes in relation to these same outcomes. As such, it was predicted that neuroticism and agreeableness should interact to predict anger and aggression according to hot/cool models of self-regulation. This hypothesis was systematically examined among three independent samples of participants (total N = 176). As predicted, neuroticism and agreeableness interacted to predict anger and aggression among all samples, and did so in a manner consistent with the hypothesis that neuroticism-anger relations would be lower at high levels of agreeableness. The results therefore highlight the distinct roles of neuroticism and agreeableness in predicting anger and aggression, while placing these traits in a common interactive self-regulatory framework.
Thirty-four subjects meeting diagnostic criteria for episodic tension-type headache and 42 who rarely experienced headaches participated in two laboratory sessions in which cephalic electromyographic (EMG) activity, electrodermal activity, heart rate, and finger temperature were recorded. Subjects performed relaxation, choice reaction time, psychomotor tracking, voluntary muscle contraction, and cold pressor tasks. Headache subjects showed significantly greater EMG activity than controls during baseline and stressful task performance. During relaxation, both groups reduced EMG activity from baseline levels, and there was no significant difference in EMG level between the groups during relaxation. Headache subjects reported higher levels of subjective anxiety, depression, anger, and stress than controls. Headache subjects also reported higher levels of pain than controls, and headache subjects reported greater pain during stressful task performance relative to baseline and recovery periods.
In this article we investigate relations between general and specific measures of self-rated affect and markers of Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Replicating previous research, we found strong and pervasive associations between Neuroticism, its facets, and the various negative affects; and between Extraversion, its facets, and the positive affects. Conscientiousness also had a significant, independent relation with general positive affect, but this effect was entirely due to the specific affect of attentiveness, which was more strongly related to Conscientiousness than Extraversion. Conversely, only the achievement facet of Conscientiousness correlated broadly with the positive affects. Finally, hostility had a strong independent association with (low) Agreeableness. The results for Neuroticism and Extraversion further clarify the temperamental basis of these higher order trait dimensions; whereas those obtained for Agreeableness and Conscientiousness illustrate the importance of examining personality-affect relations at the lower order level.
This article describes perfectionism, or the holding of and striving for unrealistically high standards, and presents two studies undertaken to investigate the convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the Perfectionism Scale (PS; Burns, 1980). College students in the first study completed the PS, several other measures of high standards, and measures of constructs that, conceptually, are differentially related to perfectionism. Correlational analyses indicated that the Perfectionism Scale has convergent and discriminant validity and seems to measure self-oriented perfectionism. The second study attempted to determine the predictive validity of the PS by testing a vulnerability model of subclinical depression outlined in Hewitt and Dyck (1986). PS scores were used to predict depressed mood changes in female college students following failure on important and unimportant tasks. As expected, the results indicated that perfectionism interacted with failure on important versus unimportant tasks to produce dysphoric mood. Evidence for the predictive validity of the PS was thus shown. Several directions for future research are discussed.
Previous research suggests that anger has important social and health consequences, particularly cardiovascular health. The pathogenic aspects of anger have not been identified, however, in part because of a reliance on unidimensional measures of anger. The present article describes psychometric data for an inventory that is sensitive to the multidimensional nature of the anger construct. It was hypothesized that the newly developed Multidimensional Anger Inventory (MAI) would include scales reflective of the following dimensions of anger: frequency, duration, magnitude, mode of expression, hostile outlook, and range of anger-eliciting situations. The mode of expression dimension was expected to contain separate anger-in, anger-out, guilt, brood, and anger-discuss measures. The inventory was administered to two populations: male and female college students and male factory workers. Factor analyses of the MAI within the two samples showed that the frequency, duration, and magnitude dimensions clustered together to form an anger-arousal factor that accounted for 64% and 71% of the variance in the two samples, respectively. The range of anger-eliciting situations and hostile outlook emerged as separate dimensions, as hypothesized. Mode of anger expression was best described by two dimensions labeled anger-in and anger-out. Psychometric analyses of the scale showed that it possessed adequate test-retest reliability (r = 0.75) and high internal consistency (alpha = .84 and .89 for the two samples). The validity of the scale was supported by the expected pattern of relations with other inventories designed to assess anger or hostility. Comparisons of MAI scores between (college versus factory) and within (male versus female) populations were made.
Describes a series of surveys on the everyday experience of anger, and a sample of data from these surveys is used to address a number of issues related to the social bases of anger. These issues include the connection between anger and aggression; the targets, instigations, and consequences of typical episodes of anger; the differences between anger and annoyance; and possible sex differences in the experience and/or expression of anger. However, the primary focus of the present paper is not on anger and aggression, but anger is used as a paradigm case to explore a number of issues in the study of emotion, including the advantages and limitations of laboratory research, the use of self-reports, the proper unit of analysis for the study of emotion, the relationship between human and animal emotion, and the authenticity of socially constituted emotional responses. (68 ref)
Five studies tested two general hypotheses: Individuals differ in their use of emotion regulation strategies such as reappraisal and suppression, and these individual differences have implications for affect, well-being, and social relationships. Study 1 presents new measures of the habitual use of reappraisal and suppression. Study 2 examines convergent and discriminant validity. Study 3 shows that reappraisers experience and express greater positive emotion and lesser negative emotion, whereas suppressors experience and express lesser positive emotion, yet experience greater negative emotion. Study 4 indicates that using reappraisal is associated with better interpersonal functioning, whereas using suppression is associated with worse interpersonal functioning. Study 5 shows that using reappraisal is related positively to well-being, whereas using suppression is related negatively.