Anger by Carol Tavris

Author:Carol Tavris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

THE STEREOTYPE UP CLOSE

For each of these eleven statements, please indicate how true or false it is of you:

1. I lose my temper easily but get over it quickly.

2. I am always patient with others.

3. I am irritated a great deal more than people are aware of.

4. It makes my blood boil to have somebody make fun of me.

5. If someone doesn’t treat me right, I don’t let it annoy me.

6. Sometimes people bother me just by being around.

7. I often feel like a powder keg ready to explode.

8. I sometimes carry a chip on my shoulder.

9. I can’t help being a little rude to people I don’t like.

10. I don’t let a lot of unimportant things irritate me.

11. Lately, I have been kind of grouchy.

You have just taken the “irritability” scale of the Buss-Durkee Inventory. Surely, you would agree, men would be more likely than women to say they are blood-boiling, grouchy powder kegs with chips on their shoulders (psychologists never seem to worry about mixing metaphors), and women to reveal themselves as patient Griseldas . . . who are maybe irritated more than “people are aware of.” In fact, according to Arnold H. Buss, coauthor of this scale, no sex differences have yet surfaced, on samples of college students and psychiatric patients.

Nor have sex differences turned up in large surveys of adults. In Charles Spielberger’s studies of “anger-in” and “anger-out”—based on his State/Trait Anger Expression Inventory, which has been given to thousands of people of all ages—males have higher scores than females on anger-in (pouting and sulking, harboring grudges, feeling secretly critical of others, keeping things in, feeling “angrier than I’m willing to admit”). Spielberger has found no sex differences on anger-out (that is, the readiness to express anger, strike out, make sarcastic remarks, and so on).

Even among people for whom anger is a trait (a characteristic aspect of personality) rather than an occasional, temporary state, women are as likely to be found as men. Jerry Deffenbacher, a clinical psychologist and researcher at Colorado State University, has developed a successful therapy for people with problems with chronic anger—and that includes as many women as men. Deffenbacher treats men and women who “describe themselves as having a significant personal problem with anger and desire help for it.” Males and females are angered by the same types of situations, Deffenbacher reports, and to the same degree, and they respond to treatment the same way.

Other researchers have set foot into the world to interview adults in their natural habitat. For example, two researchers recruited eighty men and women between the ages of twenty-one and sixty, and asked them straightforward questions about a real experience with anger that they had had in the last week. No self-delusions here about being patient or grouchy; each person had to tell exactly what happened, and to whom, and what they did and how they felt. The researchers then compared the men’s and women’s answers on a total of 128 items. The differences that turned up,

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