Resilience and the expression of driving anger

- Resilience was positively related to adaptive/constructive driving anger expression.
- Resilience was not related to aggressive forms of driving anger expression.
- Women tended to report more adaptive/constructive expression than men.
- Crashed/fined drivers were more prone to report aggressive forms of expression.

The main aim of this research was to investigate the relationship between resilience and the expression of driving anger. In addition, the adequacy of a Spanish version of a short form of the Driving Anger Expression inventory (DAX) was assessed, along with the relationships the DAX subscales had with gender, age, licence tenure, fines and crashes. The sample consisted of 2409 Spanish undergraduate students (mean age = 21.60; S.D. = 2.86; 60% women). A Spanish adaption of the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (CD-RISC) was used to measure resilience and the 15-item short form of the Driving Anger Expression inventory (DAX) was used to measure the expression of driving anger. The research found that resilience was directly associated with the adaptive/constructive expression of driving anger even after controlling for age, gender, licence tenure, fines and crash involvement. Nevertheless, as there is no previous research on this topic and the effect sizes were only moderate, further research is needed to clarify the role of resilience in the expression of driving anger. Furthermore, confirmatory factor analysis supports the adequacy of the short form of the DAX amongst Spanish drivers. In line with previous research, women tended to report more adaptive/constructive expression than men, while those who had crashed or been fined were more prone to report aggressive forms of driving anger expression.