In this essay I expend upon the theoretical background of my project on female rage. Through my work I examine how the anger of women is currently viewed and translated in a patriarchal society. I look at different example as a way to contextualize my work, starting from Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes. I reflect on representations of anger closely through different time periods, mediums and in collaboration with other women. I analyse the process of creating my final visual work RAGE – Glossary to a Woman’s Anger.

Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old student, carried out the Day of Retribution in Isla Vista, California, leaving six dead and fourteen wounded, before taking his own life. There here have been numerous attempts to explain his behavior including claims of him having features of autism spectrum disorder, traits of psychopathy and psychotic symptoms, narcissism, depression, fragile masculinity, and deviant sexual fantasies. This study examines the link between strain, coping and violence, based on General Strain Theory, using a qualitative content analysis of Elliot’s manifesto, My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger. The results indicate that Elliot experienced multiple sources of strain in his life and that he lacked adequate coping skills, which affected his perceptions of and interactions with the world. He experienced isolation, frustration and anger. These negative emotions together with his sense of entitlement intensified over the years, creating desire for revenge and justifying use of extreme violence as an attempt to eliminate strain and find relief.

Forgiveness is an essential component of relationship growth and healing, with academic, professional, and public interest in research and writing on the topic continually increasing over the past two decades. Indignation is endemic to interpersonal offense, and a key component of the forgiveness process; few, however, have written about the potentially facilitative role that it may play. Disparate conceptualizations of indignation among researchers and therapists may impede therapeutic progress, individually and interpersonally. This study presents a review of social science literature on forgiveness and a new model of the emotional response to offense that positions corrective, protective indignation on a continuum between two contrasting manifestations of destructive anger that reflect distortions in underlying views of self, other, and relationship. The study also includes the results of a statistical analysis of the Indignation and Forgiveness Scale (IFS) administered to a group of relational therapists (N = 98) gauging their professional judgment of the acceptability of indignation as a component of forgiveness as a facilitative emotion in the overall process of forgiveness. Overall, therapists expressed a strong belief in the compatibility of indignation and forgiveness. As a psychometric instrument, the IFS displayed multidimensionality, with items loading onto four subscales. Of the demographic characteristics, only the number of hours therapists' worked per week affected their views on indignation and forgiveness, with greater professional involvement leading to more favorable views of indignation in therapy for infidelity. Professional interest combined with a lack of theoretical and practical literature on these topics indicates that marriage therapists and scholars are prepared for continued research and model development on the role of constructive indignation in forgiveness.

Guided by models of family unpredictability, this study was designed to identify the distinctive sequelae of disorganized interparental conflict, a dimension of interparental conflict characterized by abrupt, inexplicable changes in parental emotional lability, conflict tactics, and verbalizations. Participants included 208 kindergarten children (M age = 5.74 years; 56% girls), mothers, and their caregiving partners from racially diverse backgrounds (e.g., 44% Black) who participated in a longitudinal study with two annual measurement occasions. At Wave 1, trained observers assessed disorganized interparental conflict. Observational and survey assessments were used to assess several family (i.e., interparental conflict, parenting difficulties, parent psychopathology, family instability) and demographic (i.e., children's gender, household income, parent education) characteristics. Assessments of child functioning at each wave included psychological adjustment (i.e., externalizing and internalizing symptoms, prosocial behavior), social information processing difficulties, and attention to emotion cues. Findings from structural equation modeling analyses indicated disorganized interparental conflict significantly predicted decreases in children's prosocial behavior and increases in their externalizing problems, angry reactivity to social problems, and biased attention to angry and sad cues over a one-year period. Results were significant while controlling for established measures of interparental conflict, parenting difficulties, parent psychopathology, family instability, and demographic characteristics. The findings suggest that disorganized characteristics of interparental conflict may be an important domain of clinical change beyond the established targets of family harshness and adversity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The current research investigates how the perceived emotional responses of a majority of Americans to 9/11 (i.e., collective anger and fear) affect individuals’ support for governmental policies, in particular, military intervention, anti-immigration policy, and restricting civil liberties. Study 1 found that perceived collective anger was associated with support for military intervention and anti-immigration policy, and that those effects of perceived collective anger on policy support were significantly driven by individuals’ own anger. Study 2 showed that experimentally manipulated collective anger (i.e., exposure to the majority’s anger relative to the minority’s anger) had marginal effects on support for anti-immigration policy and restricting civil liberties, and individuals’ own anger mediated the marginal effect of collective anger on support for restricting civil liberties. Participants exposed to either the majority’s or minority’s fear supported anti-immigration policy and restricting civil liberties as strongly as did those exposed to the majority’s anger. Implications and limitations of these findings were discussed.

What are the relationships between strength of racial identification, anger, and the political behavior of white women? Building on the literature on white identity politics and anger in political behavior, I argue that white identity and anger have a conditional relationship that leads to changes in multiple aspects of white women's political behavior. This dissertation uses the 2016 American National Election Survey and the 2016 Comprehensive Multiracial Post-election Survey to explore these associations. The findings show that there is a relationship between white racial identity conditioned on anger or threat and the strength of white women's partisanship and their issue opinions. When there is no anger or threat measure included, the relationship with political participation is weaker than expected which supports the importance of anger and its predecessor threat in the political behavior of white women. Overall, this dissertation expands the areas of white political behavior that are associated with strength of racial identity and anger as well as finding these relationships specifically with white women.

The ability to experience, use, and eventually control anger is crucial for maintaining well-being, achieving our goals, and building healthy relationships. Despite its relevance, the neural and psychological mechanisms behind this emotion are still in their early stages. Therefore, the present work represents an effort towards the investigation of these features of anger, where the ambition is to take a step forward to bridge the gaps between the research and clinical fields. Chapter 1 will expose an introduction on anger, while Chapter 2 will expose the evidence in literature on the neural bases of anger relying on a meta-analytic approach, where the neural bases of anger perception and anger experience will be investigated. Chapter 3 relies on a multivariate data-driven approach in order to study the neural networks of anger-related individual differences, identifying a structural network associated with trait anger and a functional network associated with anger control. Chapter 4 focuses on the neural bases of other anger-related individual differences, relying on functional connectivity analysis to investigate the frontal asymmetry hypothesis, finding an association of a left pattern of connectivity with anger externalization and a right pattern of connectivity with anger internalization. Finally, the following two chapters focused on the regulation of anger, in particular considering two different strategies, reappraisal versus suppression, and the related effect of a mindfulness course on the regulation of anger. The final chapter will summarize the evidence provided in this thesis in order to integrate the different results.

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