[Factors influencing the sense of unintegration of thoughts in maintaining anger]

Endo and Yukawa (2012) investigated the process of maintaining anger and demonstrated that a sense of unintegration of thoughts maintained anger by promoting recurrent thinking and avoidance behavior. Our present study examined how personality characteristics and situational factors affected the process of maintaining anger. Undergraduates (N=713) wrote about an anger episode, and completed questionnaires assessing their sense of unintegration of thoughts, recurrent thinking, avoidance behaviors, and maintaining anger. The questionnaires also assessed personality characteristics such as difficulty in identifying feelings, and situational factors such as the need for maintaining relationships, anger arousability, and meaning-making for the anger episode. The results of covariance structure analysis indicated that difficulties in identifying feelings and anger arousability contributed to maintaining anger by increasing the sense of unintegration of thoughts just after the episode. However, the need for maintaining relationships directly reduced the sense of unintegration of thoughts just after the episode, and indirectly decreased the present sense of unintegration of thoughts by meaning-making. Moreover, although recurrent thinking promoted the current sense of unintegration of thoughts, it also provided meaning.