Anger
A facet of neuroticism. Four items in the IPIP-NEO-120.
The second facet of neuroticism is how readily irritation and temper arise: how much it takes to annoy a person, and how quickly annoyance becomes anger. It says nothing about what the person does with the anger, which depends on other traits, above all agreeableness.
What it does not mean
A high score is not aggression, and it is not unkindness. The facet measures the feeling, not the behaviour: many people who are quick to anger are also quick to cool, and never raise a hand or a voice. Whether anger is expressed, and how, depends more on agreeableness than on this facet.
A low score is not passivity. Slow-to-anger people have views and defend them; they are harder to provoke.
Four items make a short scale. A facet score moves more between attempts than the 24-item domain score, and it describes a tendency in ordinary life as the person reports it, not a diagnosis of anything.
High and low in daily life
High. People high on this facet say they get angry easily, get irritated easily and lose their temper. In daily life that shows as flashes of frustration in traffic and queues, sharp words regretted later, and a low threshold for other people's slowness or carelessness. The patience test on this site measures the mirror image.
Low. People low on this facet say they are not easily annoyed and rarely lose their temper. In daily life that shows as calm when things go wrong, arguments that do not escalate, and a tolerance of other people's mistakes that can look like indifference but usually is not.
Parent domain
- Neuroticism: the broad trait this facet belongs to, with five sibling facets.
What the research says it predicts
Anger relates to high neuroticism and to low agreeableness, and the two combine: people high on one and low on the other report the most anger. (Pease and Lewis, 2015)
This facet and immoderation form the volatility aspect of neuroticism, which behaves differently from the withdrawal aspect made of worry, low mood and self-consciousness. (DeYoung, Quilty and Peterson, 2007)
Women score a little higher than men on volatility on average, in a large internet sample. (Weisberg, DeYoung and Hirsh, 2011)
Where people fall
The spread of scores
Curve height shows how common each score is; the darker middle holds half of all people. If you have taken a test on this device, your marker is drawn on.
IPIP-NEO-120, anger, 4 items
410,376 people
The other facets of neuroticism
Sources and licence
Pease, C. R., & Lewis, G. J. (2015). Personality links to anger: Evidence for trait interaction and differentiation across expression style. Personality and Individual Differences, 74, 159-164. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2014.10.018
DeYoung, C. G., Quilty, L. C., & Peterson, J. B. (2007). Between facets and domains: 10 aspects of the Big Five. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93(5), 880-896. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.93.5.880
Weisberg, Y. J., DeYoung, C. G., & Hirsh, J. B. (2011). Gender differences in personality across the ten aspects of the Big Five. Frontiers in Psychology, 2, 178. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00178
Instrument: IPIP-NEO-120. Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89. doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2014.05.003 Key: https://ipip.ori.org/30FacetNEO-PI-RItems.htm.
Norms: Johnson, J. A. IPIP-NEO-120 public dataset (IPIP120.dat), OSF component wxvth of osf.io/tbmh5, https://osf.io/wxvth/.
Licence: Public domain (IPIP). Permission is granted automatically for any person to use IPIP items for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial. https://ipip.ori.org/newPermission.htm
Instrument: IPIP Big-Five Factor Markers. Goldberg, L. R. (1992). The development of markers for the Big-Five factor structure. Psychological Assessment, 4(1), 26-42. doi:10.1037/1040-3590.4.1.26 Key: https://ipip.ori.org/newBigFive5broadKey.htm.
Norms: Open-Source Psychometrics Project, IPIP Big-Five Factor Markers responses (IPIP-FFM-data-8Nov2018.zip), 1,015,342 responses collected 2016 to 2018, https://openpsychometrics.org/_rawdata/.
Licence: Public domain (IPIP). Permission is granted automatically for any person to use IPIP items for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial. https://ipip.ori.org/newPermission.htm