What is anger provoking? A psychophysical study of perceived causes of anger.

From a pool of nearly 900 situations, anonymously described by young people from prepuberty to adolescence as anger provoking, 60 situations were randomly drawn. Twelve advanced students of psychology independently rated the similarity between each possible pair of situations with respect to the perceived cause of anger. The resultant averaged similarity matrix was subjected to factor analysis, and ten factors were deemed an optimal solution, both psychologically and statistically. The factor structure is described and discussed, and other findings of situational dimensions, not made explicit by the factor analysis, are also discussed.

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