Anger in relation to school learning

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increased interest in the study of emotions. This is especially true for anger, which had neither been studied intensively in main stream psychology nor in educational psychology. The focus in the first part of this article is on the conceptualization and measurement of anger. A distinction is made between various anger constructs: “Trait-Anger” refers to a frequency judgment about experiencing anger, “Anger-In” and “Anger-Out” are typical ways in which students express their anger, and “Anger-Control” refers to the way students try to reduce their Anger-In or Anger-Out. In the second half of the article, an attempt is made to demonstrate that specific ways of expressing and controlling one's anger may differentially affect school results, as reflected in grade-point-average (GPA) for native language learning. The predictive power of the separate anger measures is investigated as well as the predictive power of various product terms including anger measures, anxiety and coping profiles. The implications of these findings for learning and instruction are discussed.