Levels of anger in psychiatric inpatients and normal subjects

The mean anger scores of psychiatric inpatients (n = 110) on the State-Trait Anger Scale were compared with those of nonpatients (ns = 64 and 59). The inpatient group had significantly higher scores on the two measures of anger. No significant differences were found among the psychiatric diagnostic subgroups, but patients with affective disorders had scores much lower than individuals with personality disorders. Relatively high reliability was found for the trait-anger scores of psychiatric patients taken one year apart.