Understanding the Misunderstood Emotion: A Mixed-Methods Investigation of Variants of Anger
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Date
2023-07-06
Authors
Razavi, Pooya
Journal Title
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
In cultural accounts and scholarly writings about anger, we see conceptualizations that reflect the existence of two variants: an anger perceived as moral, appropriate, and justified; and an anger considered wrong and unjustified. The present dissertation is focused on finding the boundaries between the two. From a functionalist perspective, it has been proposed that anger in response to harm to others is a justified prosocial reaction. Consistent with this notion, in Studies 1 and 2, I demonstrate that the expressivity norms and social consequences of anger depend on whether it is a response to harm to self or a reaction to harm to others. In the subsequent studies, I take a bottom-up approach to provide an in-depth understanding of the characteristics of the anger variants. Namely, in Study 3, I analyze participants’ narratives about their past experiences of justified and unjustified anger using qualitative thematic analysis, closed-vocabulary, and open-vocabulary text processing methods. In Study 4, I use a prototype approach to differentiate justified and unjustified anger experiences across ten dimensions. I demonstrate that these variants of anger have crucial differences in appraisals, perceptions of the targets, and the intra- and interpersonal consequences of anger. The insights from this research program have implications for constructing theories capable of explaining diverse anger experiences and can inform future interventions to address the maladaptive behaviors associated with anger.
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Keywords
anger, emotion, natural language processing, qualitative analysis