The experience and expression of anger: Relationships with gender, gender role socialization, depression, and mental health functioning

Using a sample of 445 female and 260 male college students, we investigated relationships between the experience and expression of anger and gender, gender role characteristics, and several mental health variables. Factor analyses of 17 measures of anger, aggressiveness, and hostility revealed a 3-factor pattern of aggressive acting-out, high anger proneness and poorly controlled verbally expressed anger, and anger suppression. Correlational and hierarchical regression analyses indicated that the anger composites were strong predictors of the mental health variables. Masculinity, but not femininity or androgyny, also made fairly consistent unique contributions to the prediction of the mental health variables. Gender did not uniquely contribute to the prediction of any of the mental health variables, nor did it moderate the relationships of these variables with other predictors.