Personality traits predicting anger in self-, ambiguous-, and other caused unpleasant situations

This study examined how the experience of anger is differentially related to self-esteem, trait anger, and empathy depending on who is responsible for the anger-eliciting event. Participants engaged in a directed imagery task in which they reported on their anger experience in response to six scenarios that depicted unpleasant situations in which oneself is responsible, in which responsibility is ambiguous, or in which someone else is responsible. The results demonstrated that a low self-esteem predisposed participants to experience anger only when oneself was responsible for the unpleasant event. Anger experience was related to trait anger in all studied situation types, but most strongly in situations that were ambiguous with respect to who is responsible for what has happened. Finally, empathy was found to be most strongly related to anger experience in unpleasant situations in which someone else is responsible. These findings demonstrate the importance of taking into account contextual information for predicting emotional experience on the basis of traits and illustrate how emotional experience is the result of the interaction between person and situation.