The inhibition of verbally aggressive behaviour

We studied the inhibition of verbal aggression, defined as not displaying verbal aggression when one would want to. The approach we used was based on a situation–response questionnaire containing 15 anger provoking situations and three verbally aggressive responses. Two questions were asked for each combination of a situation and a response: one about wanting to react in a verbally aggressive way and one about actually displaying the reaction. This questionnaire was administered to 316 participants. Based on different theories about inhibition, several logistic mixed models were constructed and tested against each other. In the best fitting model, inhibition was conceptualized as a trait. Trait inhibition was negatively correlated with external measures of Anger Out and positively with Control of Anger Out. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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