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The Relationship between Anger Rumination and Aggression in Typically Developing Children and High-Risk Adolescents

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Abstract

This paper examines anger rumination as a risk factor of aggression in typically developing children and high-risk adolescents. Study 1 developed and evaluated the psychometric properties of a self-report measure of children’s anger rumination (Children’s Anger Rumination Scale; CARS) and its association with teacher- and peer-rated overt and relational aggression in school-aged children (n = 254, M age = 10.62). Findings offered support for the reliability and validity of the CARS as well as support for the hypothesis that children who ruminate to anger exhibit elevated levels of overt and relational aggression. Study 2 examined concurrent and prospective relationships between anger rumination and aggression and the moderating effects of trait anger in a sample of male juvenile offenders (n = 119, M age = 16.74). Latent growth curve analyses revealed that the interaction between trait anger and anger rumination predicted initial levels of aggression (i.e., intercept) and changes in aggression over time (i.e., slope). Juvenile offenders who were high in trait anger and ruminated in response to anger exhibited the highest initial levels of aggression. Contrary to our hypothesis, this group did not exhibit greater increases in aggression over time relative to others, but instead they had stably high levels of aggression at each time point. These findings suggest that cognitive-behavioral treatment strategies for aggression may be improved by educating youths about the contributory role of anger rumination in the development of aggression and providing them with adaptive alternatives to coping with feelings of anger.

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Notes

  1. Given the added specificity of examining the relationships between the four CARS subscales and aggression, we ran regression models using subscale scores as predictors while controlling for age, sex and family income. The results of these analyses revealed that each of the four subscale scores significantly predicted all of the aggression outcome variables (p’s < .05); findings that are available upon request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, The University of Southern Mississippi, 118 College Drive, #5025, Hattiesburg, MS, 39406, USA

    Stephanie D. Smith

  2. The Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA

    Haley F. Stephens & Janet A. Kistner

  3. Baptist Health, Jacksonville, FL, USA

    Karla Repper

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  1. Stephanie D. Smith
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  4. Janet A. Kistner
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Correspondence to Stephanie D. Smith.

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Research Involving Human Participants

All procedures performed in these studies that involved human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in Study 1. As data in Study 2 were archival, formal consent was not required.

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The authors have no funding sources to report.

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All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 7 Item-level changes made to the Anger Rumination Scale (ARS) to create the Children’s Anger Rumination Scale (CARS)
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Smith, S.D., Stephens, H.F., Repper, K. et al. The Relationship between Anger Rumination and Aggression in Typically Developing Children and High-Risk Adolescents. J Psychopathol Behav Assess 38, 515–527 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-016-9542-1

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