The use of training to increase intensity of angry verbalization

This report consists of five studies pertaining to angry verbalization research. Angry verbalization research started as an attempt to shorten the psychotherapy process by training individuals directly to make angrier than usual verbalizations. The problem immediately encountered was what constituted an angrier than usual verbalization. The solution to this problem was found in the angry verbalization continuum. This continuum went from "not very angry" at the one end to "very angry" at the other end. On the continuum were to fall both the usually made angry verbalizations and, farther up, some verbalizations even angrier than the usual ones. In Study I, the idea of an angry verbalization continuum was made concrete with the development of two Angry Verbalization scales. Study II covers the development of an Egotistical Verbalization Scale, this scale going from "not very egotistical" at the one end to "very egotistical" at the other end. The Egotistical Verbalization Scale was set up to be a less emotional control scale to the Angry Verbalization scales. With the development of the anger and egotism scales, an attempt could be made to train individuals to make angrier than usual verbalizations. Studies III and IV are concerned with such an attempt. Study III describes a discrimination procedure in which individuals were trained to discriminate between angry verbalizations of different intensities, the different intensities being determined according to the anger scales. Study IV was concerned with what effects this discrimination training had on increasing the intensity of individuals' freely made angry verbalizations. In Study IV an Angry Verbalization Test was developed to elicit and to measure freely made angry verbalizations. Some data from this test were subsequently given both to a clinician and to a statistician. Study V is a comparison of the clinician's report of this data with the statistician's report. In the course of Study V, some potentially meaningful ways for conceptualizing intraindividual variability are presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)