Levels of Anger Severity in Psychiatric Patients

Given anger's clinical relevance and adverse impact on functioning, there is a need to examine diagnostically heterogeneous individuals at different levels of anger severity to provide a basis for considering anger severity in clinical research and practice. In the present report from the Rhode Island Methods to Improve Diagnostic Assessment and Services project, we examined the validity of severity classifications based on the Clinically Useful Anger Outcome Scale (CUANGOS) in 1738 clinically heterogeneous psychiatric outpatients. We compared patients reporting no, mild, moderate, or severe anger with regard to demographics, psychosocial morbidity, functioning, and life satisfaction. Increasing anger severity was associated with elevated clinician-rated psychosocial morbidity and poorer self-rated functioning and life satisfaction. Results demonstrate that assessing anger severity yields crucial information about psychosocial functioning and morbidity. This provides additional validity evidence for self-reported anger in general and the CUANGOS in particular, in that the CUANGOS can validly distinguish among meaningfully different anger severity levels.