Daily Associations Among Anger Experience and Intimate Partner Aggression Within Aggressive and Nonaggressive Community Couples

Anger is an empirically established precipitant to aggressive responding toward intimate partners. The current investigation examined the effects of anger, as experienced by both partners, as well as gender and previous aggression, on in vivo intimate-partner aggression (IPA) using a prospective daily diary methodology. Participants (N = 118 couples) individually provided 56 consecutive, daily reports of affective experience and partner aggression. Multilevel models were estimated using the actor-partner interdependence model (APIM) framework to analyze the daily associations between anger and partner-aggression perpetration among participating men and women, as moderated by aggression history. Results revealed that both actor and partner anger were generally associated with subsequently reported daily conflict. Further, increases in daily partner anger were associated with corresponding increases in partner aggression among both women who reported high levels of anger and men, regardless of their own anger experience. Increases in actor anger were associated with increases in daily partner aggression only among previously aggressive women. Previously aggressive men and women consistently reported greater perpetration than their nonaggressive counterparts on days of high levels of actors' anger experiences. Results emphasize the importance of both actor and partner factors in partner aggression and suggest that female anger may be a stronger predictor of both female-to-male and male-to-female partner aggression than male anger, when measured at the daily level.