نقش چشم انداز در انگیختگی خشم

Although there are strong grounds to expect that perspective taking deficits are associated with anger arousal following an interpersonal provocation, there has been little research directly testing this hypothesis. In this study, 636 volunteers were asked to rate their likely reactions to two brief video representations of potentially anger arousing social transgressions. Results confirm the relationship between dispositional perspective taking and the likelihood of anger arousal following an interpersonal provocation. Perspective taking was also predictive of trait anger (negatively) and of the means of control and expression of anger. Associations between personal distress and anger measures indicate the possible influence of the intensity, regulation, and direction of emotion on anger.

Although the emotion of anger has been the subject of increasing theoretical analysis and clinical application in the last 15 years, the empirical literature investigating the nature of anger remains relatively scant, particularly when compared with the published literature on other negative emotions such as anxiety and depression (Kassinove, 1995). At the same time, the clinical application of existing theoretical models of anger has burgeoned, arguably at a faster rate than the fundamental research required to support such an application. For example, anger is widely considered to be a potential contributing factor to aggression (e.g., Novaco, 1994 and Novaco, 1997), and comparative studies suggest that prison inmates, violent offenders in particular, score higher on measures of anger experience and expression than other members of the community (Mills et al., 1998 and Spielberger, 1991). One of the ways in which anger management programs aim to help offenders and other participants to act less aggressively is by changing the ways in which they perceive interpersonal provocation. Perceptions of another’s provoking behaviour are reframed in treatment in ways that are thought to be less likely to lead to angry cognitions and arousal. What is less well understood is the way in which individual differences, such as perspective taking, influence those interpretations of behaviour that lead to anger arousal. The term “perspective taking” is used here to denote the tendency or ability of an individual to consider a situation from another’s point of view and has been distinguished both theoretically and empirically from affective or emotional empathy (Davis, 1980 and Hogan, 1969). Davis (1983a) has provided the most widely accepted definition of perspective taking as “the tendency to spontaneously adopt the psychological point of view of others” (pp. 113–114; see also Bernstein and Davis, 1982, Davis, 1980, Davis, 1983b, Davis et al., 1987 and Davis and Oathout, 1992), implying that perspective taking is a skill that involves a number of cognitive processes. In his original validation work, Davis, 1980 and Davis, 1983a differentiated perspective taking from other possible empathic responses that have been documented in the literature (e.g., Hoffman, 1978 and Stotland et al., 1978) including empathic concern (emotional empathy), personal distress (proneness to negative affect when exposed to arousal inducing situations such as emergency situations), and fantasy (the capacity for imaginative involvement in fictional situations). Perspective taking skills might inhibit angry responses to provocation in at least two ways. First, they might inhibit anger arousal directly by decreasing the likelihood that provocations will be perceived in ways that lead to blame. A number of studies have investigated the importance of the types of attributions and appraisals made in potentially anger provoking situations. Ferguson and Rule (1983) suggested that the attributions an individual makes when involved in an interpersonal interaction can mediate his or her subsequent anger experience and anger related reactions. They argued that in interpersonal interactions in which an individual has in some way been harmed, he/she undertakes attributional work to understand whether what occurred was the result of behaviour from the other person that was accidental or deliberate, foreseeable or unforeseeable, and malevolently or non-malevolently intended, in creating a causal framework of events. McAuley and Shaffer (1993) reported the implication of external attributions of control in the generation of anger. Smith and colleagues have argued for the explanatory power of the appraisals individuals make of a situation and their central meaning (core relational theme) in emotional experience. According to this model, the appraisal of an event as important and interfering with personal goals and of the other individual in an interaction as accountable for the event underlies the core relational theme of other-blame that elicits the experience of anger (Smith and Lazarus, 1993 and Smith et al., 1993). The relevance of attributions of hostile intent and subsequent evaluations of blame for subsequent anger experience and angry-aggressive behaviour are well established for both adults and juveniles (Dodge and Schwarz, 1997 and Hazebroek et al., 1999). More recent empirical work has demonstrated that in situations involving interpersonal transgression, perspective taking ability tends to lead to more relationship enhancing outcomes such as forgiveness. Zechmeister and Romero (2002) found that participants who forgave others following situations when they felt angered or hurt were more likely to exhibit perspective taking in their narratives. Forgiveness within this study was associated with lower state anger as well as lesser attributions of responsibility and deliberateness to the actions of the other individual (see also Konstam, Chernoff, & Deveney, 2001). This suggests that perspective taking leads to a series of assessments that result in inhibition of more negative responses in favor of more relationship restoring behaviour. Moreover, an empathic set may be associated with a shift in attributions for another’s behaviour – more situational and less dispositional – to resemble more closely those attributions individuals make for their own behaviour (Regan & Totten, 1975). A second way in which perspective taking might inhibit anger arousal is in terms of the ability of high-perspective takers to maintain a high level of cognitive functioning when aroused by an interpersonal provocation. Richardson, Green, and Lago (1998) have reported experimental support for this process, placing their findings within Zillmann’s (1988) cognitive excitation theory of anger, which suggests that arousal in response to a threat interferes with higher level cognitive functioning and thereby weakens inhibition against aggression. Zillmann (1983) suggested that, at extreme levels of arousal, the “cognitive mediation of behaviour is expected to be greatly impaired” (p. 94). Likewise, Tyson (1998) has suggested that high-levels of anger can result in cognitive systems “being overwhelmed” (p. 145). This explanation is also consistent with Baumeister’s (1990) work on self-regulation breakdown, which suggests that under certain conditions, such as a state of negative affective arousal, individuals experience a state of cognitive deconstruction characterised by a disengaging from the self-system. If it is accepted that perspective taking deficits may contribute to the likelihood or intensity of anger in response to a provocation, it is also conceivable that perspective taking deficits influence anger arousal differently according to different contexts or types of provocation. For example, the effects of perspective taking on anger may be more pronounced in situations that are more cognitively complex: for example, situations where intent is ambiguous. This suggestion is consistent with the findings of Hazebroek et al. (1999) that differences between individuals high and low in trait anger in anger aroused by a provocation and blaming of the provoker were greater in situations where the intent of the provoker was more ambiguous. Similarly, it can be argued that the effects of differences in perspective taking will be more apparent when the intent of a provoker is more ambiguous, and thus more open to interpretation. The aim of this study was to examine the links between perspective taking and anger arousal following interpersonal provocation at differing levels of ambiguity of intent. It was hypothesized that greater individual differences in perspective taking ability would predict lesser anger following an interpersonal provocation. The relationship of perspective taking to trait anger and the way anger is experienced was also examined.

The relationship of perspective taking to self-reported anger in response to a social transgression, to trait anger, and to the expression and control of anger is likely to be of interest to those involved in the design and delivery of interventions to reduce anger related aggression. At present, perspective taking deficits are probably addressed to some degree in the cognitive biases component of anger treatment, where unrealistic and invalid, anger inducing cognitions and appraisals become the focus for change. Indeed, asking a question such as “How might another person have seen this situation?” is a common technique in cognitive behavioural therapy for undermining habitual and dysfunctional patterns of thinking. Perspective taking deficits per se, however, are rarely the focus of sustained therapeutic attention. The possibility that highly angry individuals might find being asked to shift perspective an unfamiliar and difficult task suggests that developing techniques to enhance perspective taking skills should be a high priority for the future development of anger treatments.