Childhood and Anger

If one witnesses or went through negative unstable events as a child, like violence, emotional and/ or physical neglect, lived in a traumatizing environment, they are likely to still show signs of that as an adult. As many may know, one's childhood and development become very crucial to the rest of their life. Children make meaning out of the events they witness and the things that happen to them and through this they go on to make their own perception of the world. Some factors of one's childhood may follow them as they grow older and result in them developing major anger issues. Having anger issues can affect and take a toll on one's everyday life in various aspects and many often may not know the reasons behind their anger or even why they have it.

In most recent studies like the one with Galambos, Johnson, & Krahn (2018), researchers analyzed and compared in three different models of the events that happen with expressed anger and depressive symptoms. There were four hypothesis that were kept in mind as it was being conducted. The first one hypothesized that those with higher expressed anger will show higher levels of depressive symptoms. The second assumed that the changes that all individuals have in expressed anger and depressive symptoms will vary together positively. The third hypothesis was that the relations between expressed anger and depressive symptoms will be observed in two different directions.

Lastly it was hypothesized that the social support one has will mediate the anger-depression relation so the more expressed anger will reduce social support, and on the other hand social support will anticipate increased depressive symptoms. This study consisted of a longitudinal-quantitative study. There were six different levels of the data collected from the time the participants were seniors and twenty-five years after. They were analyzed to compare the three models of the different occurrences between expressed anger and depressive symptoms and between-persons differences only model.

In the Rueth & Wild (2017) study they mediated the relation between parenting and psychosocial adjustment of the adolescents. In this study it was important to analyze the influences of parental control and independent support of the adolescent's problem and social behavior. In addition to this it was important to analyze the mediating role of adolescents' anger regulation and the effect to moderate the anger. Here they did and collected data from a three-year longitudinal questionnaire from parents and their children. When the adolescents were given the questionnaire to fill out the questions were on paper and were also read out loud for prevention of reading difficulty. Then they were given another questionnaire to give to their parents to fill out.

After everything was collected and analyzed it presented the mediating role of adolescent's level of adaptive anger regulation and bad adaptive anger regulation. In addition, it showed that parent support benefits the ability to regulate and socially adjust. Where on the other hand the opposite effects were shown in psychological control. In the category of gender, the only differences were found in the report of the parent's data not the adolescents.

In another article Maldonado, Walkins, and DiLillo (2015) the researchers examined three risk factors for intimate partner aggression, with trait anger and childhood abuse history and alcohol consumption. It was hypothesized a positive three-way interaction in which increased trait anger and childhood physical abuse would predict IPA most strongly when alcohol consumption was high but that this interaction would be weaker when alcohol consumption was low. In addition, in order to demonstrate the pattern in the three-way interaction, it was hypothesized simple effects for trait anger.

They predicted simple effects in which trait anger would be related to IPA at higher levels of alcohol consumption and higher levels of childhood physical abuse history, but weakly related when alcohol consumption and childhood physical abuse history are lower. This study was a quantitative study where the participants were 236 male and female college students in a committed heterosexual dating relationship who completed a battery of self-report measures assessing childhood physical abuse, trait anger, alcohol consumption, and IPA. The results showed a significant three-way interaction showing that as alcohol consumption increased, the interaction of the trait anger and childhood physical abuse, became increasingly more positive. Individuals who had high levels of childhood physical abuse and alcohol consumption were at greater risk of IPA when trait anger was high. These findings show that trait anger and a history of childhood physical abuse may increase tendencies to aggress against one's partner, where alcohol consumption may reduce individuals' abilities to manage these aggressive tendencies.

An article about anger in the trajectory of healing from childhood maltreatment, Thomas, Bannister, and Hall (2012), involved a study that examined anger is six different girls that experienced abuse during childhood. The six cases were purposefully selected because their interviews contained rich descriptions of anger experiences.

The data was collected through both a qualitative and quantitative study through interviews. The researchers found that their experiences all depicted five types of anger. Anger ranged from nonproductive, self-castigating behavior to empowering, righteous anger that enabled women to protect themselves from further abuse and to advocate for abused children.
This proposed study is important to get an understanding of the connections between the childhood trauma one experiences and the effects it has on one's anger. It is hypothesized that the experiences that one is exposed to as a child is the underlying factor of the anger issues they possess as an adult that effects their daily life and relationship with the people around them.

Participants

Information about the study was sent to colleges and universities of the Chicagoland area to recruit those students who were interested. The 800 students who responded to the flyer were required to be between the ages 18-29 and obviously had to be from a college or university in Chicago. From the 800, only 500 were randomly selected to be part of the actual study. The participants represented a mix of races/ethnicities that included Hispanics, African Americans, Caucasians, Asians, etc., and there was also an equal spread of males and females. Half of the participants (N=250) will represent low to normal scores of childhood trauma, while the other half (N=250) will represent high scores of childhood trauma.

Materials

Information sheet will be created containing a brief overview of the study and sent out to recruit participants. The setting of the study will be in a classroom at North Park University. Laptops will be provided so participants can use to complete several surveys/ questionnaires. The 2 surveys/ questionnaires will be accessed on surveymonkey.com. Once all the results are collected, a statistics software called SPSS will be used to find the correlation between childhood trauma and anger issues.

Procedure

To begin to recruit participants there will be information provided to draw in volunteers. On the sheet the importance about childhood experiences and how they can cause anger issues in the future will be stated. It will also list the requirements that the participants have to meet to be part of the study. Volunteers will be asked to attend two survey sessions. One will consist of the process of identifying the different experiences of the participants. They will be presented with 10 questions that asks them about their childhood before the age of 18, whether they had a lot of childhood trauma experiences or normal/low childhood trauma. After taking the first survey, participants will come back after one day. The day in between the two surveys will be spent looking at the results and separating the participants into the two groups depending on where they fall. The second session of the study will consist of a survey that identifies the level of anger one has. After collecting all this data, the SPSS statistics program will be used to enter the data of the scores about their experiences and anger to see if there is a correlation between the two.

Coding and Measures

The childhood trauma questionnaire will consist of 20 questions that represent different types of childhood trauma measured in the survey. They will have to rate each of the questions on a Likert scale of 1-7 (1= not at all traumatic, 7 = extremely traumatic). If their answers were higher than 49 they experienced moderate to severe childhood trauma and if it was less than 49 it meant they weren't as traumatic.

One part will relate to themselves such as: physical abuse by being pushed, slapped, strangled, restrained, and things thrown at; verbal abuse by being name-called, criticized, belittled, blamed, and manipulated; sexual abuse by making threats or taking advantage of without consent; physical neglect by not being provided with enough food, clothing, and shelter; lastly emotional neglect by failure to be provided with enough affection or support. The other part will be related to other family members: a parent who's an alcoholic, a mother who's a victim of domestic violence, a family member in jail, a family member diagnosed with a mental illness, and the disappearance of a parent through divorce, death or abandonment. They will have to rate each of the questions on a Likert scale of 1-7 (1= not at all traumatic, 7 = extremely traumatic). If their answers are greater than 70 they experienced high levels of childhood trauma and if they are less than 70, they experienced normal/ low levels.

The survey that measures and asks about their anger will have a Likert scale of 1-5 and have a total of 20 questions. The answers they give will be added up and the total will be grouped in 20 points. If the scored 80-100- their anger expression is likely to get the, into serious trouble with other. It would be recommended that they seek professional help; 60-80- they may not need professional help but need to work on controlling anger in a very cautious manner; 50-60- they have plenty of room for improvement. Reading up on anger control could be beneficial; 30-50- they're probably getting angry as often as most people. They can monitor episodes of temper and see if you can lower their score on this test; and below 30- would mean that they are in good standing and don't have to worry much about their anger.

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