This thesis sought to identify and evaluate the effects of suppressing anger on cognition and behaviour from both naturalistic and laboratory approaches. It was predicted that anger suppression places demands on valuable cognitive resources and it was predicted that this form of emotion regulation would have detrimental effects on thinking and reasoning abilities. A naturalistic study examined records of everyday anger experiences (as documented in daily diaries) and showed that anger suppression had negative effects on participants’ self-reports of concentration, critical thinking, decision-making and accuracy in the formation of judgements. The first laboratory experiment explored the effects of anger suppression on critical thinking and reasoning abilities through tests of analysis, evaluation and assumption. The second laboratory experiment investigated performance on social reasoning skills utilising theory of mind tasks to assess interpersonal perception and inference abilities. The results of the laboratory experiments showed that relative to expression, suppression was associated with superior cognitive performance on specific measures of critical and social reasoning. Overall, the findings were inconsistent and did not provide full support for the proposal that regulating anger through suppression has detrimental cognitive effects, particularly with respect to critical thinking and reasoning abilities. The implications of these findings and future directions for anger research are discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:499632 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Lowe, Christine A. |
| Publisher | University of Aberdeen |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=25964 |
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