Dispositional Anger and Experiential Avoidance in Veterans with PTSD

摘要

Background: Anger is often indirectly addressed in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) treatment despitereports that traumafocussed therapy may not be sufficient in improving anger responses1. Thus, it is possiblethat anger in the context of PTSD might be related to additional factors such as personality traits and copingstyles.Purpose: We sought to identify additional elements influencing anger. We hypothesised that trait anger (apersonality trait) and experiential avoidance (a coping style) would account for significant variance in stateanger when controlling for PTSD symptom severity in a sample of treatment-seeking veterans with a historyof PTSD.Material and Methods: One-hundred and one veterans completed pencil-and-paper surveys including thePosttraumatic Stress Disorder Checklist, Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II, and State-Trait AngerExpression Inventory-2, and a subsample of 79 veterans meeting screening criteria for PTSD were included inthese analyses.