Behavioral assessment
The Driving Anger Expression Inventory: a measure of how people express their anger on the road

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(01)00063-8Get rights and content

Abstract

Four ways people express their anger when driving were identified. Verbal Aggressive Expression (α=0.88) assesses verbally aggressive expression of anger (e.g., yelling or cursing at another driver); Personal Physical Aggressive Expression (α=0.81), the ways the person uses him/herself to express anger (e.g., trying to get out and tell off or have a physical fight with another driver); Use of the Vehicle to Express Anger (α=0.86), the ways the person uses his/her vehicle to express anger (e.g., flashing lights at or cutting another driver off in anger); and Adaptive/Constructive Expression (α=0.90), the ways the person copes positively with anger (e.g., focuses on safe driving or tries to relax). Aggressive forms can be summed into Total Aggressive Expression Index (α=0.90). Aggressive forms of expression correlated positively with each other (rs=0.39–0.48), but were uncorrelated or correlated negatively with adaptive/constructive expression (rs=−0.02 to −0.22). Aggressive forms of anger expression correlated positively with driving-related anger, aggression, and risky behavior; adaptive/constructive expression tended to correlate negatively with these variables. Differences in the strengths of correlations and regression analyses supported discriminant and incremental validity and suggested forms of anger expression contributed differentially to understanding driving-related behaviors. Theoretical and treatment implications were explored.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 290 (82 male, 182 female, and 26 were missing demographic information due to an inadvertent omission on their questionnaires) introductory psychology students (Mdnage=19 yr) at a state university of over 20,000 in the western US. Of these 85% were freshmen, 12% sophomores, and 3% juniors and seniors; 87% were White non-Hispanic, 3% Latino, 2% African American, 2% Asian American, and 6% mixed or other ethnic background. Participants received one of three research credits for

Results

Responses to the 62 items were subjected to a principal components analysis with a varimax rotation and the Kaiser normalization procedure. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were set at 0.40 (i.e., an item had to have an item to factor correlation >0.40, while it could not load >0.40 on another factor). These procedures resulted in five factors or forms of expressing anger while driving (Table 1). A 12-item factor was labeled Verbal Aggressive Expression (α=0.88), because items involved

Discussion

Five forms of expressing anger when driving were identified. Although worthy of future development and exploration, Displaced Aggression was dropped from analyses in this study because of low reliability. The remaining four dimensions were reliable and included three forms of expressing anger aggressively. These were verbal aggression, using one's person and being to aggress, and using the vehicle as the instrument of aggressive anger expression. The fourth form of expression was dealing with

Acknowledgements

This study was supported, in part, by Grant R49/CCR811509-04 from the Centers for Disease Control and Grants R01 DA04777 and P50 DA07074 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

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