Alison Poor, a 2nd year doctoral student working in the Anger and Traffic Psychology Lab, successfully defended her master's thesis this week. Her thesis examined trait anger, anger rumination, relational victimization, and vengeance as predictors of relational aggression among college students.

Ali examined two research questions separately due to the expected overlap between some of her variables and differences in the theoretical rationale for the models she tested. First, she found that anger rumination mediated the relationship between trait anger and relational aggression. Second, she found that vengeance did not mediate the relationship between relational victimization and relational aggression, although both relational victimization and vengeance predicted relational aggression.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Ali's thesis defense was conducted online through Microsoft Teams. Fortunately, everything worked well and the online format was not an issue.

Congratulations to Ali on a successful thesis defense!

Tags: anger rumination, relational aggression, victimization, trait anger

Alison Poor, a first-year student in the Counseling Psychology Doctoral Program at the University of Southern Mississippi, successfully proposed her master’s thesis this week. Ali’s thesis will examine the role of trait anger, anger rumination, relational victimization, and vengeance in the context of relational aggression among college students.

Ali’s primary focus will be on trait anger, anger rumination, and relational aggression. We expect that anger rumination will mediate the relationship between trait anger and relational aggression, much as it has in previous studies with overt aggression. Although vengeance is being included on more of an exploratory basis to inform future studies of relational victimization, we expect that the relationship between relational victimization and relational aggression may be mediated by vengeful attitudes.

Congratulations to Ali on a successful thesis proposal!

Tags: relational aggression, anger rumination, trait anger

Skylar Hicks, a third-year student in the Counseling Psychology doctoral program at the University of Southern Mississippi, successfully defended her master’s thesis this week. Skylar’s thesis, The role of emotion regulation in the relationship between trait anger and relational aggression, explored the role of general negative affect, trait anger, and difficulties in emotion regulation in peer relational aggression among college students.

She found that trait anger and difficulties in emotion regulation were positively related to peer relational aggression. That is, students with a higher propensity to experience angry feelings and difficulties regulating their emotions were more likely to report engaging in relationally aggressive behavior in their peer relationships. Contrary to what was expected, difficulties in emotion regulation did not moderate the relationship between trait anger and relational aggression. We will likely conduct additional analyses to determine why this might be the case and how best to incorporate emotion regulation in future studies.

Tags: emotion regulation, relational aggression, trait anger

Anger is something with which we are all familiar from our extensive personal experience with it. And yet, anger seems to be a bit more complex and multifaceted than most of us realize. Emotionally, we experience anger as a range of feelings from minor frustration or annoyance to intense rage or fury. This emotional experience is what most readily comes to mind when we reflect on a recent anger episode. Anger also involves characteristic physiological, cognitive, and behavioral components.

At the physiological level, anger involves arousal of the autonomic nervous system. This is typically experienced as a rush of adrenaline, muscle tension, increased heart rate, and other sensations which are part of how our bodies prepare us for action. Some people experience this sort of physiological arousal more intensely than others, and some experience it over a longer period of time than others. This combination of intense and long-lasting arousal can be a risk factor for a number of health problems.

Cognitively, anger often involves the perception of some sort of threat to ourselves, our property, our self-image, or other areas with which we identify. During an angry episode, we are likely to perceive even neutral events as being intentional, unfair, and undeserved. Not surprisingly, this usually has the effect of making us angrier. It turns out that how we think about events in our environment is very important to why we become angry initially and how our anger is maintained over time.

The behavioral component of anger includes the manner in which it is communicated. Some people tend to suppress their anger, holding it inside until they feel like they are going to boil over. This is sometimes described as an “anger-in” style of anger expression. Others express their anger outwardly in uncontrolled displays of yelling, slamming doors, threatening others, or even aggressive behavior (i.e., an “anger-out” approach to anger expression). Both of these anger expression styles can lead to problems, and both can be contrasted with healthy anger control.

At the Anger and Traffic Psychology Lab, we are interested in trait anger (i.e., one’s general propensity to experience angry feelings), anger expression and control, and a number of closely-related topics (e.g., anger rumination, hostility, emotion regulation, aggression). At mild to moderate levels, anger can have a number of beneficial effects; however, anger that is excessive, chronic, or associated with maladaptive behaviors can lead to a number of problems and deserves attention.

Tags: anger expression, emotion regulation, trait anger