Anger stands as one of the most multifaceted and misunderstood emotions expressed by humans. Despite its frequent occurrence across every stratum of society, the internal mechanics and developmental roots of anger remain elusive, particularly when anger manifests in maladaptive and harmful ways. Recent efforts by a research team have sought to peel back the layers of this intense emotional experience, introducing a new, rigorously validated tool designed to capture the subtle nuances of anger: the Inside the Anger questionnaire, or InAn. This innovative instrument promises to deepen our understanding of anger’s internal architecture, providing fresh insights that could revolutionize both clinical approaches and personal management strategies.
While the psychological community has long possessed various tools to assess anger, the new InAn questionnaire addresses critical gaps by emphasizing the individual’s internal perceptions and affective responses to themselves and their environment. Traditional approaches often focus on outward expressions or general temperament traits but tend to overlook the intricate interaction between self-concept, emotional regulation, and environmental triggers that together sculpt the anger experience. The InAn tool was meticulously developed to fill these voids by offering a multi-dimensional perspective that is both sensitive and specific to the nuances of anger development.
In an ambitious data collection effort, the questionnaire was validated among 471 participants comprising two distinct populations: municipal employees in Brescia and inmates in Bollate prison. This diverse pool allowed the researchers to examine anger through differing social and psychological lenses, capturing variability in expression and underlying triggers. Importantly, the prison cohort completed only the new InAn questionnaire, ensuring focused data collection on this novel measure, while municipal employees also responded to established anger and affective neuroscience scales, facilitating robust cross-validation.
The InAn questionnaire consists of 29 scenario-based items rated on a four-point Likert scale, ranging from “Never” to “Always,” to gauge the frequency of anger experiences in varying contexts. This design allows respondents to specialize their answers with precision, providing a granular profile of their anger dynamics. The resulting data underwent rigorous exploratory factor analysis, which distilled the responses into five distinct factors representing critical dimensions of anger processing and expression.
These emergent factors include ineffective arousal management, indicating difficulties in regulating physiological and emotional activation; feelings of the self that disrupt healthy affirmation, reflecting self-directed emotional turmoil; an inability to integrate fragility, showcasing challenges in accepting vulnerability; and defense of boundaries, encapsulating protective mechanisms against perceived threats. Remarkably, these four factors collectively accounted for an impressive 92.7% of the total variance, underscoring their comprehensive coverage of the anger experience within the sampled populations.
The psychometric solidity of the InAn questionnaire was further confirmed through internal consistency measures, with an overall Cronbach’s alpha of 0.876. Each factor demonstrated strong reliability, particularly the first two, bolstering confidence in the questionnaire’s ability to reliably capture the underlying constructs. These high alpha values indicate that the items cohesively assess their respective domains without excessive redundancy, a balance crucial for both research and clinical applications where precision and interpretability must align.
Confirmatory factor analysis reinforced the validity of the five-factor model, providing further empirical support that these components authentically represent the architecture of anger as outlined by the questionnaire. Factor correlation matrices demonstrated discriminant validity, confirming that these anger dimensions are distinct yet interrelated components of the broader emotional landscape. This sophisticated statistical validation ensures the tool’s theoretical and practical robustness.
What makes InAn particularly innovative is its developmental perspective, which attempts not just to quantify anger but to uncover foundational emotional and cognitive processes contributing to its formation. By focusing on internal experiences, self-perceptions, and defensive mechanisms, InAn captures the dynamic interplay of vulnerability, boundary-setting, and arousal management that typically remain hidden behind overt anger reactions. This nuanced approach presents new pathways for therapeutic intervention aimed at targeting underlying developmental difficulties rather than surface behaviors alone.
Beyond theoretical contributions, the InAn questionnaire holds promising clinical value. Individuals struggling with anger management can benefit immensely from an assessment that goes beyond simple anger expression and probes the developmental and emotional substrates underpinning their feelings. For therapists and practitioners, InAn offers a tool to tailor treatments according to specific domains of dysfunction, such as arousal dysregulation or fragile self-concept, potentially enhancing therapeutic outcomes and reducing relapse rates.
The inclusion of diverse participant groups, especially the prison population, adds ecological validity and highlights the questionnaire’s versatility in different settings. Anger in correctional environments often has profound societal implications, including impacts on rehabilitation and recidivism. Having a validated, sensitive measure that captures the complexity of anger in such environments could inform targeted interventions, risk assessments, and supportive programs tailored to the needs of incarcerated individuals.
This study’s deployment of advanced statistical techniques using Stata software version 18 ensures methodological rigor and transparency, setting a high standard for future emotion-focused instruments. The careful linkage with established measures like STAXI-2 and ANPS 3.1 enables comprehensive comparative analyses, situating InAn within the broader context of anger and affective neuroscience research while offering clear advancements in scope and precision.
In sum, the Inside the Anger questionnaire is a groundbreaking contribution to emotional psychology and psychiatry. It fosters a deeper understanding of anger as a complex, multifactorial emotion shaped by developmental processes, self-perceptions, and environmental interactions. With its strong psychometric properties and validation across diverse cohorts, InAn is poised to become an essential tool both in research settings and clinical practice, empowering individuals and practitioners alike to confront and navigate the intricacies of anger with newfound clarity and efficacy.
Subject of Research: Development and validation of an innovative anger assessment tool focusing on developmental aspects and emotional self-perceptions.
Article Title: Inside the anger: development and validation of a new questionnaire.
Article References:
Manfredi, P., Vesentini, R., Taglietti, C. et al. Inside the anger: development and validation of a new questionnaire. BMC Psychiatry 25, 980 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-025-07465-0
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-025-07465-0
