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Anger Management in Sport
Understanding and Controlling Violence in Athletes
by Mitch Abrams
296 Pages
Anger management is becoming an increasingly significant area of study in sport. This issue affects all people involved in the sporting environment, yet few sport professionals, coaches, or administrators fully understand anger in sport and how to work with athletes to overcome the problem. Anger Management in Sport: Understanding and Controlling Violence in Athletes addresses this important topic and provides strategies and interventions for overcoming excessive anger and aggression in athletes. The provocative book challenges long-held assumptions and points the way to further research and discussion.
With its accessible format and proactive approach, Anger Management in Sport is an ideal resource for practitioners at all levels of sport who work with athletes and anger, both on and off the field. The author draws on his unique background and clinical experiences creating and implementing anger management skills for a variety of populations—from high school athletes to prison inmates. His unique insight will stimulate discussion on a range of issues associated with anger in sport, including mental illness, drugs, and differences and similarities in amateur and professional athletes. Readers will understand not only how to approach an anger problem but also how to help an athlete work to manage emotions.
Rather than eliminate old explanations, the book paves the way to a new understanding of issues vital to the health of sport. Chapters 1 and 2 help readers better understand anger and violence and how to assess anger in sport. Anger, aggression, violence, and hostility are defined so that readers will understand the conceptual differences between each. Chapter 3 discusses the athletic culture and how anger is uniquely considered in sports. Readers will recognize some instances of anger in sport through the discussion of such high-profile events as the Baylor University basketball scandal, the O.J. Simpson trial, and the infamous 2004 Pacers-Pistons NBA melee in Detroit involving crowd aggression. Chapters 5 and 6 examine mental illness and drugs in sport. Chapters 7 through 9 tackle anger management programs, systematic interventions for athletes, and prevention of sexual violence.
Real-world situations presented in the text will engage readers and help them picture how to use anger management skills in their own lives and careers. By considering the various stakeholders involved and the preventive measures that can be taken, researchers and professionals will step closer to discovering best practices and strategies for anger management in today’s sport society.
Although helping athletes deal with anger is an important part of sport, there is little research to address the key issues regarding this difficult subject. Anger Management in Sport will help readers understand the causes for anger in sport and how to help athletes who demonstrate aggressive behavior. It will shed light on an uncharted issue and provide direction for future research in the area.
Chapter 1. A New Understanding of Anger and Violence in Sport
Chapter 2. The Scope of Violence and Aggression in Sport
Chapter 3. Assessing Anger in Sport
Chapter 4. Understanding the Athlete Culture
Chapter 5. Mental Illness and Violence in Sport
Chapter 6. Drugs, Violence, and Sport
Chapter 7. Developing and Utilizing Anger Management Programs for Athletes
Chapter 8. Systemic Interventions for Athletes
Chapter 9. Prevention of Sexual Violence
Mitch Abrams, PsyD, is a clinician administrator for University Correctional HealthCare/UMDNJ, where he is responsible for the delivery of mental health services for 6 of the state’s 13 state prisons. Dr. Abrams co-coordinates the forensic track of UMDNJ’s predoctoral psychology internship and has been involved with several aspects of advancing the quality of mental health services in prison systems. He is a clinical assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at UMDNJ/Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and has held adjunct faculty positions at Brooklyn College, C.W. Post, and Fairleigh Dickinson University. Since 2000, he has been in private practice providing sport, clinical, and forensic psychology services.
Dr. Abrams began consulting with athletes in 1997 while developing the only comprehensive anger management program for athletes. He has created a niche in using anger management training to assist athletes in reaching peak performance on the field and in life. He has consulted with thousands of athletes and has developed programs for athletic organizations at the youth sport, high school, and college levels. He is the founder and president of Learned Excellence for Athletes, a sport psychology consulting company located in Fords, New Jersey.
Raised in Brooklyn, New York, Dr. Abrams received a bachelor of science degree from Brooklyn College and earned a master of science degree in applied psychology and a doctorate of psychology (PsyD) in clinical psychology from C.W. Post/Long Island University. He also received specialized training in family violence and anger management. He is a full member of the American Psychological Association as well as its Division 47 (Exercise and Sport Psychology) and Division 41 (American Psychology-Law Society). Further, he holds membership in the Association for Applied Sport Psychology (AASP), where he is also the chair of the Anger and Violence in Sport Special Interest Group (SIG), and the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT).
Learn the difference between anger, aggression, and violence
Anger, aggression, and violence can surface while participating in sports and affect how the game is played.
A New Vernacular
I believe that the definitions used in the sport psychology field regarding anger and violence require streamlining. As we go through relevant terminology and definitions that I think should be standardized (if for no other reason than to have pragmatic language that people can agree on), I will explain why I have made refinements to previously used terms.
Anger
Anger is a normal emotion. Anger is neither good nor bad, and no judgment need be attached to it. Some people believe that a problem arises if a person becomes angry. This idea is not true. To pass judgment on anger and condemn those who admit to becoming angry is the equivalent of robbing people of their humanness. Disallowing oneself from any part of the human experience weakens the experience in its totality. Sadness gives a reference point that makes happiness more appreciated. Tension can be better understood when compared with relaxation. It is about time we stopped making value judgments about anger. No one has ever gotten in trouble for becoming angry. You could be furious right now, but no one would know it unless you demonstrated some behavior associated with the anger. The belief that anger is bad is so strongly engrained that people will sometimes deny its existence even when it is spilling out all over the place. We have all heard someone with a red face expel incendiary words accompanied by saliva and then follow up by saying, “I am not angry!” The bad rap that anger has received has made it even more resistant to examination.
Truth be told, anger can be harnessed and used as fuel to assist in performance. Can it interfere with performance? You bet! Does it have to? Absolutely not. I have helped athletes compete harder with greater intensity for longer periods, motivated by their anger. The issue is not a matter of eliminating anger; it is a matter of keeping it at a level where it assists, not detracts from, performance.
Studies have shown that as anger increases, cognitive processing speed goes down, fine motor coordination and sensitivity to pain decrease, and muscle strength often increases. So for some athletes doing some tasks, anger can be helpful. For example, the defensive lineman who must make his way past a blocker to make a tackle might benefit from having some level of anger. For other tasks, anger would be a hindrance. The quarterback who needs to read the defense before deciding which receiver to throw to would likely perform better if he was not angry. In fact, some research supports this thesis. Players at football positions that require a lot of decision making tend to demonstrate lower levels of anger than players at positions that do not.
Therefore, when we talk about anger management for peak performance in sport, we are not always talking about making athletes polite and calm. Rather, we are referring to their ability to self-regulate their emotions to what their tasks require.
Aggression
What does it mean to be aggressive? Definitions that have permeated sport psychology for decades have stated that aggression has harm to another as a goal. It is no wonder that people frown on aggression in sport; it means that someone has to get hurt. This statement is not true. The adverb aggressively describes the method by which people go after their goals. It refers to the tenacity, the hunger, and the determination that people embody when striving for accomplishments. I checked: The women who succeeded on Wall Street climbed the corporate ladder aggressively. Success in life is not just handed to people. They have to want it. They have to go get it themselves. At the heart of Nike's “Just Do It” campaign is the idea of not waiting for it to come to you. Instead, you go from being passive to active and doing it yourself. Aggression is a necessary requirement for success in sport and in life in general.
Aggressive behavior can be broken down into various categories. The delineation that makes the most sense is that between instrumental aggression and reactive aggression.
Instrumental aggression is goal-directed aggression in which harm to another is not the primary goal, although it can be a secondary result of the action. In sport, an example would be the basketball player who slashes to the basket, leaps over a defender, and accidentally catches another defender with an elbow on the way up to scoring two points with a resounding dunk. The goal was to put the ball in the hole, not to harm an opponent. People who participate in sport know that injury is always a possibility. Accidental injuries happen. No blame should be assigned, and nothing in the rules of the game bans these incidents. Instrumental aggression is the hallmark for success in life and in sport and should be encouraged.
Some authors have described instrumental aggression as assertiveness. I believe that in making this distinction, psychologists are trying to soften things up in defense of the position that aggression is bad. Let us examine this for a moment. To be assertive is to stand up for one's rights. In fact, in the psychotherapy world, assertiveness training is used for people who have self-esteem problems. We teach them communication skills (we will revisit this topic later in the book) that will help them effectively and appropriately have their needs met.
To illustrate how assertiveness is not the same as instrumental aggression, consider the following: The tailback is 10 yards out from the goal line. Three defenders block the path between him and six points. Will he assertively communicate to his opponents, “Excuse me, gentlemen, would it be OK if you just acquiesced and allowed me to run past you? After all, it is my right to score this touchdown, you know”? Of course not! The tailback has no entitlement to score. He has no right to win. He succeeds only by aggressively going after his goal. So when you see the tailback launch his body through the air like a missile trying to bowl over the last defender after skillfully dancing his way between the other two, do not think assertive; think Walter Payton—aggressive.
But that is not the whole story on aggression. Another type of aggression is called reactive aggression, sometimes referred to as hostile aggression. Reactive aggression is behavior that has as its primary and sometimes solitary goal to do harm to someone. Usually, this action is in response to a perceived injustice, insult, or wrongdoing. This form of aggression is related to anger and is the behavior that gets athletes in trouble, both on and off the field. An example of reactive aggression may be the pitcher who is furious that the last time a certain batter came to the plate, he hit a 450-foot (140-meter) homer that cleared the bleachers. Still fuming, the pitcher aims his 95 mile-per-hour (150-kilometer-per-hour) fastball between the hitter's shoulder blades.
Violence
Reactive aggression, in its most extreme forms, is violence, but the definition is not reflexive. Not all violence comes from anger and reactive aggression. Violence has, at its root, harm to another as its planned result.
Predatory violence, for example, is behavior in which the hunter seeks the hunted. In the animal world, the stealthy lion waits patiently in the brush for its prey to wander close enough to be ambushed. In the world of serial killers who hunt their victims, predators often do not have an increase in heart rate or sympathetic nervous system activity that usually accompanies anger. Anger is not related to this activity and in fact would interfere with the ability to hunt.
Terry and Jackson (1985) clarified sport violence as harm-inducing behavior outside the rules of sport, bearing no direct relationship to the competitive goals of sport. This definition nicely carved out a type of violence different from society's violence.
In an attempt to explain sport violence, I developed the Abrams model of sports violence (figure 1.1) that reflects the seeming overlap between aggression and violence. Understanding that injury can be part of the game, we can differentiate violence in the same way that we differentiate aggression. Incidental violence is violence that does not have harming another as its sole goal; it is directed toward sport goals. In contrast, reactive or hostile violence has the specific goal of causing harm to someone else.
Both represent behaviors that may go beyond the rules of the sport, but incidental violence is an extension of acceptable behavior. Checking in hockey provides a useful example. The line that differentiates checking from cross-checking or boarding, both of which are penalties, is often blurry. Overzealous players can certainly have their behavior spill over to being illegal. This behavior is different from reactive violence, in which the behavior is retaliatory. This kind of behavior can also be broken down into two categories. The first is the spontaneous response. There are some players who pride themselves on their ability to get inside their opponents' heads and will deliberately provoke them to take them off their game. New York Rangers forward Sean Avery, often described as an agitator, is particularly proficient at this. So, the player provokes the other repeatedly, perhaps by checking them with their stick. Finally, the provoking player checks the first player one too many times, and the player turns and swings the stick at the opponent's head. The response, although extreme, was not planned. This is spontaneous reactive aggression and is directly related to anger. Anger management programs specifically target reducing this type of behavior. More immediately though, the league or organization must penalize, fine, or suspend players engaging in such behavior as it can very easily cause serious injury.
Using psychological inventories to assess anger
Learn about different types of inventory methods and whether or not they work.
Using Psychological Inventories
The hallmark of psychology research is the self-report inventory. Many inventories were developed with the hope of capturing an emotion in a questionnaire. These too present problems.
The first problem with anger inventories is that they tend to be high in what researchers call face validity. The validity of a test is the extent to which it measures what it is supposed to measure. Face validity is the extent to which a test, on the face of it, measures what it is supposed to. Subjects who take tests that are high in face validity can easily tell what the researcher is measuring. For an emotional state like anger, which many people recognize has a negative connotation; subjects can provide answers that depict themselves in a favorable light. The test is easily faked. For that matter, if a subject wants the researcher to draw a particular conclusion, he or she can make the test show those results. Subjects respond in the ways that they do on such tests for many reasons. Those with an acquiescence bias will give the answer that they believe the researcher wants. Some want to paint themselves in a positive light. Some really do not pay attention to how they feel, and their self-report may not be based on reality. Some people lie. This may surprise you, but some people who lie do not have a specific reason to do so. A common false assumption is that people lie only if they have a good reason to do so, if they have something to gain. But, people lie for the fun of it, for the excitement of it, because they enjoy deceiving people, or for no reason at all. And the problem is that on these tests, it is hard to tell when someone is lying if the person lies consistently throughout the answers.
The second problem with anger scales is that a one-to-one correlation does not exist between measures on self-report inventories and behavior. Does every person who scores high on anger scales get in fights? No. One might even hypothesize that athletes who scores high on a self-report measure are less likely to act out because they have some awareness of their anger. Moreover, many of these scales were originally developed to measure pathology. Suppose that a student scored higher than everyone else in the class but her or his score did not reach the threshold of where anger is considered a problem. Can we say that this student is angrier than the other students? Maybe, but what does it mean? Not much.
The last problem with self-report measures is that even the ones that measure anger in state (being in an angry state right now) and trait (pervasive pattern of anger) dimensions, if not given when respondents are angry, may not reflect the true intensity of their emotions.
Nonetheless, self-report questionnaires are probably the best standardized tools that we have. Although several are available, I am going to focus on two that seem to be the most commonly used in the sport and clinical psychology literatures.
Profile of Moods States (POMS)
Originally developed in 1971 by McNair, Lorr, and Droppleman, the Profile of Mood States (POMS) has been cited in approximately 300 articles in the sport and exercise psychology literature. The test is a self-report measure in which subjects report on a Likert scale to what degree they experience the word describing an emotional state. The 65 words or phrases load into six mood states: tension, depression, anger, vigor, fatigue, and confusion. These six states can then be charted and their relative elevations noted.
Early research by William Morgan in the 1970s yielded the “iceberg profile” of elite athletes. While consulting with the United States Olympic Committee, Morgan found that successful elite athletes could be differentiated from unsuccessful candidates by this profile. Successful athletes had an elevation in vigor but much lower values for all the other mood states. This model has come under greater scrutiny over time, most notably in a meta-analysis of the articles that studied the iceberg profile (Rowley et al., 1995). Although that study found the iceberg profile to be a weak predictor of athletic success, the Profile of Mood States is still widely used and is currently found in approximately 1,500 published articles when you include studies outside of sport psychology as well.
The ease of administration paired with its established place in the sport psychology world makes the POMS one of the two instruments of choice in measuring anger in sport.
State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2)
The State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2), developed by psychologist Charles Spielberger, is the gold standard for anger assessment. STAXI-2 is a self-report inventory that measures anger in multiple dimensions. By responding to 57 items on a four-point scale (with 1 equating to “not at all” or “almost never” and 4 equating to “very much so” or “almost always”) assessment of the subjects' anger includes “either the intensity of their angry feelings at a particular time or how frequently anger is experienced, expressed, suppressed or controlled.” (Spielberger, STAXI-2 Manual, p. 4) The inventory is simple to administer, requiring only about 15 minutes, is normed for adolescents and adults, and is written at a sixth-grade reading level. Although it has not been normed specifically on athletes, its utility makes it ripe for such an extension. Finally, the inventory can be administered individually or in group settings.
The STAXI-2 measures anger along seven major scales and five subscales:
1. State Anger (S-Ang)—the intensity of and extent to which a person feels like expressing anger at a particular time.
a. Feeling Angry (S-Ang/F)—the intensity of the anger that the person is currently experiencing.
b. Feel Like Expressing Anger Verbally (S-Ang/V)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger verbally.
c. Feel Like Expressing Physically (S-Ang/P)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger physically.
2. Trait Anger (T-Ang)—how often angry feelings are experienced over time.
a. Angry Temperament (T-Ang/T)—measures the disposition to experience anger without specific provocation.
b. Angry Reaction (T-Ang/R)—the frequency that angry feelings are experienced in situations that involved frustration or negative evaluations.
3. Anger Expression-Out (AX-O)—how often anger is expressed in verbally or physically aggressive behavior.
4. Anger Expression-In (AX-I)—how often anger is experienced but not expressed.
5. Anger Control-Out (AC-O)—how often the person controls the outward expression of anger.
6. Anger Control-In (AC-I)—how often a person attempts to calm down to control angry feelings.
7. Anger Expression Index (AX Index)—a general index of anger expression.
As can be seen, the STAXI-2 does not just measure anger along different dimensions; it also taps the different methods that subjects report using to manage their anger. In my opinion, it is the most useful anger assessment tool available because it not only describes the person's anger but also gives the sport psychologist the starting point of knowing how the person assesses his or her own anger management tendencies.
Considering the lack of study that anger, aggression, and violence have received in sport psychology as a whole, it is not surprising that few sport-specific anger measures are available. The Bredemeier Athletic Aggression Inventory (BAAGI) (Bredemeier, 1975) deserves some attention because it measures instrumental aggression as well as reactive aggression. Following the theme that instrumental aggression is what we want to reinforce and reactive aggression is related to anger and needs to be curbed, this instrument may prove to have significant utility in future anger management studies of athletes.
One of the newer instruments to be introduced is the Competitive Aggressiveness and Anger Scale (CAAS; Maxwell & Moores, 2007) developed by Jon Maxwell and his colleagues in Hong Kong. Initial findings suggest that the CAAS is a valid scale for the measurement of aggressive tendencies (aggressiveness) and anger in sport. Because it attempts to overcome the shortcomings of other instruments, it has promise.
Developing anger management programs for athletes
The program uses guidelines to identify and manage anger.
The culmination of the previous chapters leads us to the “How To” of anger management. As should be clear by now, getting angry in and of itself, is not a problem. It is the high levels of anger that lead to reactive aggression. The program that is outlined below provides guidelines on how to recognize one's emotion levels and control them. This is done by becoming aware of one's body, how it changes when one is very angry, and different methods to both calm down when very angry as well as ways to avoid getting so angry in the first place. These techniques are truly cognitive and behavioral skills.
Prescreening for Anger Management Participation
Certain groups of people should be evaluated before they are enrolled in an anger management program. When I say evaluated, I do not mean unilaterally ruled out, but prescreened. Certain kinds of people are more likely to benefit than others are from this type of work, and determining who they are is important before beginning any anger management work.
The first question should always be this: Why are you here? If the person is self-referred and motivated—great! If the person shows up because someone said that he or she had to be there—beware! Mandated therapies are notoriously difficult, particularly when people are getting help for behavioral patterns that may be ego syntonic (they like acting that way). People who are doing this work are more likely to benefit from it if they are there because they chose to be there. I am not opposed to discussing with clients the benefits that they can get from anger management training, which certainly includes satisfying the mandate of whoever made the referral. Ultimately, success or failure will come from the client, not from the leader, so the person has the choice of how to proceed. Often, when the issue is posed that way, the client will concede and stay, at least to check it out. If you demand that they stay and participate, you may be wasting each other's time. Sometimes, people do better by delaying their participation until they are ready to do the work.
The second question is this: Who is the client? As in all sport psychology interventions, this question is critical. The issue is about more than knowing who is going to sign the check. The more important issues involve who is expecting results and how they are going to know about them. Sorting this out ahead of time is necessary to avoid confidentiality concerns and ethical conflicts as well to create a safe therapeutic space for the work to be done.
The last area of prescreening, which may include pretest questionnaires or other psychological testing in rare cases, is whether the likely problem for the individual is a skills deficit or severe psychopathology or even psychopathy. Refer to chapter 3 for instruments that may help make this determination.
When I receive an anger management referral, whether clinical or sport related, I ask for information about a recent medical examination and any counseling history. The screening should ask direct questions about past or current pathology, including substance abuse, to ascertain whether the client would be best served in a more controlled arena, such as in individual sessions where clinical problems can be addressed along with the anger issues. If you are not psychologically trained, you should refer the client to someone with the proper background before you start down this path. It could quickly go to places that you never expected.
Individual Versus Group
As Bruce Hale and I explained in our chapter for Shane Murphy's Sport Psych Handbook, both individual and group interventions have pluses and minuses. These attributes should be considered when deciding how to implement anger management skills.
Individual counseling sessions allow greater exploration of incidents and issues that may be embarrassing if addressed in front of others. Furthermore, if a hidden psychopathology may present, especially a trauma-related issue, a group setting could be not only humiliating but also damaging. In addition, current teammates may soon be on opposing teams. Sharing thoughts and feelings may leave a person feeling vulnerable. Exploring those thoughts and feelings one-on-one in a safe environment may promote greater honesty; the lack thereof is a considerable obstacle to progress.
Group interventions offer the opportunity for a group of athletes to learn the skills together. This aspect may be particularly valuable when the intervention is for a whole team or parts thereof. Reinforcement can then occur outside the leader's office, and what is learned can be extended to new environments. In my experience, group sessions can have a significant team-building effect. Athletes learn more about how other athletes think. Through role playing, they can see how their peers react to situations that may also develop in other venues. This area would be another good topic for research. In research on these types of interventions, measures of team cohesion may provide some useful information. By learning each other's triggers, players can help their teammates regain composure and self-control in volatile situations rather than react in a destructive manner.
In no case, however, do I assign any athlete to be responsible for the behavior of another. I do believe that athletes influence each other and contribute to the culture in which decisions are made, but people must ultimately take responsibility for themselves. Collectively, the team takes responsibility for the team.
Finally, although role playing is an excellent way to teach the lessons that follow, and it tends to be more effective than a lecture-based format, the leader must strive to make the program exciting, interactive, and fun. People learn better when they are having fun.
Anger Management
Hey, how do you feel?
Good?
Fine?
OK?
Not bad?
No, how do you feel?
Several basic elements can hinder the effectiveness of anger management programs. The first is that most people do not know how to label their emotions. Any emotion management program must begin with teaching people how to recognize how they feel. Just as important is to recognize that the purpose is not truly to manage anger. The real purpose is to manage behavior associated with anger, or reactive aggression management. The place to start is with emotion labeling because as arousal increases, controlling emotions and related behavior becomes increasingly difficult.
Emotion Labeling
In my opinion, the deficit in emotional labeling has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. The cause may be our susceptibility to the more-is-better approach: “If one is good, then give me a thousand.” We have great difficulty identifying how we feel and how much we feel. After all, emotions have their own experience, which varies slightly from person to person, but they can also be experienced at different intensities, frequencies, and durations.
Nothing about any emotion is inherently good or bad. The judgment that we place on them is the single greatest obstacle to managing them. To expand, parents often tell their children that being angry is not good. Men are socialized as boys to hide their emotions, especially their fears and sadness, although they may be simultaneously confused by the intense football coach who encourages their anger and aggression. The 12-year-old Pop Warner football player who cries may be called a sissy, a girl—as if being a girl is a bad thing—or worse. I will focus more on communication between coaches and athletes later, but at the onset, we must divorce ourselves from the idea that having a particular emotion is good or bad. Making that sort of judgment is complete nonsense.
The way to go about teaching athletes to label their emotions is twofold. The easier way to start is to teach them how their bodies react during emotional changes. They have their bodies with them all the time, they tend to pay close attention to their bodies (in my experience, the only group of clients who pay more attention to how their bodies feel are substance abusers), and they can gain tangible results from controlling the physiological changes associated with emotion.
Ask your athletes to imagine for a moment that they are not young human athletes but instead cute fuzzy bunnies in the woods. (Expect some groaning from your young male athletes, but proceed anyway.) Set up this scenario. You are hopping along and out of nowhere, a giant grizzly bear pops out with its claws bared and saliva dripping from its fangs. It growls as it moves toward its next meal . . . you.
Are you scared?
You bet your butt! How do you know? Think about how your body feels. What must you do to survive? You need either to run or to get ready to fight. In either case, your body needs to prepare for action. The autonomic nervous system is the automatic, involuntary part of the nervous system. It has two parts. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the increase in the following functions, and the parasympathetic nervous system controls the decrease. A loose analogy would be that the sympathetic nervous system is the on switch and the parasympathetic nervous system is the off switch. It is not quite that simple because some bodily functions do not abide by those rules, but in a fight-or-flight situation—in which you must either run or fight to survive—the sympathetic nervous system kicks in full force.
Learn the difference between anger, aggression, and violence
Anger, aggression, and violence can surface while participating in sports and affect how the game is played.
A New Vernacular
I believe that the definitions used in the sport psychology field regarding anger and violence require streamlining. As we go through relevant terminology and definitions that I think should be standardized (if for no other reason than to have pragmatic language that people can agree on), I will explain why I have made refinements to previously used terms.
Anger
Anger is a normal emotion. Anger is neither good nor bad, and no judgment need be attached to it. Some people believe that a problem arises if a person becomes angry. This idea is not true. To pass judgment on anger and condemn those who admit to becoming angry is the equivalent of robbing people of their humanness. Disallowing oneself from any part of the human experience weakens the experience in its totality. Sadness gives a reference point that makes happiness more appreciated. Tension can be better understood when compared with relaxation. It is about time we stopped making value judgments about anger. No one has ever gotten in trouble for becoming angry. You could be furious right now, but no one would know it unless you demonstrated some behavior associated with the anger. The belief that anger is bad is so strongly engrained that people will sometimes deny its existence even when it is spilling out all over the place. We have all heard someone with a red face expel incendiary words accompanied by saliva and then follow up by saying, “I am not angry!” The bad rap that anger has received has made it even more resistant to examination.
Truth be told, anger can be harnessed and used as fuel to assist in performance. Can it interfere with performance? You bet! Does it have to? Absolutely not. I have helped athletes compete harder with greater intensity for longer periods, motivated by their anger. The issue is not a matter of eliminating anger; it is a matter of keeping it at a level where it assists, not detracts from, performance.
Studies have shown that as anger increases, cognitive processing speed goes down, fine motor coordination and sensitivity to pain decrease, and muscle strength often increases. So for some athletes doing some tasks, anger can be helpful. For example, the defensive lineman who must make his way past a blocker to make a tackle might benefit from having some level of anger. For other tasks, anger would be a hindrance. The quarterback who needs to read the defense before deciding which receiver to throw to would likely perform better if he was not angry. In fact, some research supports this thesis. Players at football positions that require a lot of decision making tend to demonstrate lower levels of anger than players at positions that do not.
Therefore, when we talk about anger management for peak performance in sport, we are not always talking about making athletes polite and calm. Rather, we are referring to their ability to self-regulate their emotions to what their tasks require.
Aggression
What does it mean to be aggressive? Definitions that have permeated sport psychology for decades have stated that aggression has harm to another as a goal. It is no wonder that people frown on aggression in sport; it means that someone has to get hurt. This statement is not true. The adverb aggressively describes the method by which people go after their goals. It refers to the tenacity, the hunger, and the determination that people embody when striving for accomplishments. I checked: The women who succeeded on Wall Street climbed the corporate ladder aggressively. Success in life is not just handed to people. They have to want it. They have to go get it themselves. At the heart of Nike's “Just Do It” campaign is the idea of not waiting for it to come to you. Instead, you go from being passive to active and doing it yourself. Aggression is a necessary requirement for success in sport and in life in general.
Aggressive behavior can be broken down into various categories. The delineation that makes the most sense is that between instrumental aggression and reactive aggression.
Instrumental aggression is goal-directed aggression in which harm to another is not the primary goal, although it can be a secondary result of the action. In sport, an example would be the basketball player who slashes to the basket, leaps over a defender, and accidentally catches another defender with an elbow on the way up to scoring two points with a resounding dunk. The goal was to put the ball in the hole, not to harm an opponent. People who participate in sport know that injury is always a possibility. Accidental injuries happen. No blame should be assigned, and nothing in the rules of the game bans these incidents. Instrumental aggression is the hallmark for success in life and in sport and should be encouraged.
Some authors have described instrumental aggression as assertiveness. I believe that in making this distinction, psychologists are trying to soften things up in defense of the position that aggression is bad. Let us examine this for a moment. To be assertive is to stand up for one's rights. In fact, in the psychotherapy world, assertiveness training is used for people who have self-esteem problems. We teach them communication skills (we will revisit this topic later in the book) that will help them effectively and appropriately have their needs met.
To illustrate how assertiveness is not the same as instrumental aggression, consider the following: The tailback is 10 yards out from the goal line. Three defenders block the path between him and six points. Will he assertively communicate to his opponents, “Excuse me, gentlemen, would it be OK if you just acquiesced and allowed me to run past you? After all, it is my right to score this touchdown, you know”? Of course not! The tailback has no entitlement to score. He has no right to win. He succeeds only by aggressively going after his goal. So when you see the tailback launch his body through the air like a missile trying to bowl over the last defender after skillfully dancing his way between the other two, do not think assertive; think Walter Payton—aggressive.
But that is not the whole story on aggression. Another type of aggression is called reactive aggression, sometimes referred to as hostile aggression. Reactive aggression is behavior that has as its primary and sometimes solitary goal to do harm to someone. Usually, this action is in response to a perceived injustice, insult, or wrongdoing. This form of aggression is related to anger and is the behavior that gets athletes in trouble, both on and off the field. An example of reactive aggression may be the pitcher who is furious that the last time a certain batter came to the plate, he hit a 450-foot (140-meter) homer that cleared the bleachers. Still fuming, the pitcher aims his 95 mile-per-hour (150-kilometer-per-hour) fastball between the hitter's shoulder blades.
Violence
Reactive aggression, in its most extreme forms, is violence, but the definition is not reflexive. Not all violence comes from anger and reactive aggression. Violence has, at its root, harm to another as its planned result.
Predatory violence, for example, is behavior in which the hunter seeks the hunted. In the animal world, the stealthy lion waits patiently in the brush for its prey to wander close enough to be ambushed. In the world of serial killers who hunt their victims, predators often do not have an increase in heart rate or sympathetic nervous system activity that usually accompanies anger. Anger is not related to this activity and in fact would interfere with the ability to hunt.
Terry and Jackson (1985) clarified sport violence as harm-inducing behavior outside the rules of sport, bearing no direct relationship to the competitive goals of sport. This definition nicely carved out a type of violence different from society's violence.
In an attempt to explain sport violence, I developed the Abrams model of sports violence (figure 1.1) that reflects the seeming overlap between aggression and violence. Understanding that injury can be part of the game, we can differentiate violence in the same way that we differentiate aggression. Incidental violence is violence that does not have harming another as its sole goal; it is directed toward sport goals. In contrast, reactive or hostile violence has the specific goal of causing harm to someone else.
Both represent behaviors that may go beyond the rules of the sport, but incidental violence is an extension of acceptable behavior. Checking in hockey provides a useful example. The line that differentiates checking from cross-checking or boarding, both of which are penalties, is often blurry. Overzealous players can certainly have their behavior spill over to being illegal. This behavior is different from reactive violence, in which the behavior is retaliatory. This kind of behavior can also be broken down into two categories. The first is the spontaneous response. There are some players who pride themselves on their ability to get inside their opponents' heads and will deliberately provoke them to take them off their game. New York Rangers forward Sean Avery, often described as an agitator, is particularly proficient at this. So, the player provokes the other repeatedly, perhaps by checking them with their stick. Finally, the provoking player checks the first player one too many times, and the player turns and swings the stick at the opponent's head. The response, although extreme, was not planned. This is spontaneous reactive aggression and is directly related to anger. Anger management programs specifically target reducing this type of behavior. More immediately though, the league or organization must penalize, fine, or suspend players engaging in such behavior as it can very easily cause serious injury.
Using psychological inventories to assess anger
Learn about different types of inventory methods and whether or not they work.
Using Psychological Inventories
The hallmark of psychology research is the self-report inventory. Many inventories were developed with the hope of capturing an emotion in a questionnaire. These too present problems.
The first problem with anger inventories is that they tend to be high in what researchers call face validity. The validity of a test is the extent to which it measures what it is supposed to measure. Face validity is the extent to which a test, on the face of it, measures what it is supposed to. Subjects who take tests that are high in face validity can easily tell what the researcher is measuring. For an emotional state like anger, which many people recognize has a negative connotation; subjects can provide answers that depict themselves in a favorable light. The test is easily faked. For that matter, if a subject wants the researcher to draw a particular conclusion, he or she can make the test show those results. Subjects respond in the ways that they do on such tests for many reasons. Those with an acquiescence bias will give the answer that they believe the researcher wants. Some want to paint themselves in a positive light. Some really do not pay attention to how they feel, and their self-report may not be based on reality. Some people lie. This may surprise you, but some people who lie do not have a specific reason to do so. A common false assumption is that people lie only if they have a good reason to do so, if they have something to gain. But, people lie for the fun of it, for the excitement of it, because they enjoy deceiving people, or for no reason at all. And the problem is that on these tests, it is hard to tell when someone is lying if the person lies consistently throughout the answers.
The second problem with anger scales is that a one-to-one correlation does not exist between measures on self-report inventories and behavior. Does every person who scores high on anger scales get in fights? No. One might even hypothesize that athletes who scores high on a self-report measure are less likely to act out because they have some awareness of their anger. Moreover, many of these scales were originally developed to measure pathology. Suppose that a student scored higher than everyone else in the class but her or his score did not reach the threshold of where anger is considered a problem. Can we say that this student is angrier than the other students? Maybe, but what does it mean? Not much.
The last problem with self-report measures is that even the ones that measure anger in state (being in an angry state right now) and trait (pervasive pattern of anger) dimensions, if not given when respondents are angry, may not reflect the true intensity of their emotions.
Nonetheless, self-report questionnaires are probably the best standardized tools that we have. Although several are available, I am going to focus on two that seem to be the most commonly used in the sport and clinical psychology literatures.
Profile of Moods States (POMS)
Originally developed in 1971 by McNair, Lorr, and Droppleman, the Profile of Mood States (POMS) has been cited in approximately 300 articles in the sport and exercise psychology literature. The test is a self-report measure in which subjects report on a Likert scale to what degree they experience the word describing an emotional state. The 65 words or phrases load into six mood states: tension, depression, anger, vigor, fatigue, and confusion. These six states can then be charted and their relative elevations noted.
Early research by William Morgan in the 1970s yielded the “iceberg profile” of elite athletes. While consulting with the United States Olympic Committee, Morgan found that successful elite athletes could be differentiated from unsuccessful candidates by this profile. Successful athletes had an elevation in vigor but much lower values for all the other mood states. This model has come under greater scrutiny over time, most notably in a meta-analysis of the articles that studied the iceberg profile (Rowley et al., 1995). Although that study found the iceberg profile to be a weak predictor of athletic success, the Profile of Mood States is still widely used and is currently found in approximately 1,500 published articles when you include studies outside of sport psychology as well.
The ease of administration paired with its established place in the sport psychology world makes the POMS one of the two instruments of choice in measuring anger in sport.
State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2)
The State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2), developed by psychologist Charles Spielberger, is the gold standard for anger assessment. STAXI-2 is a self-report inventory that measures anger in multiple dimensions. By responding to 57 items on a four-point scale (with 1 equating to “not at all” or “almost never” and 4 equating to “very much so” or “almost always”) assessment of the subjects' anger includes “either the intensity of their angry feelings at a particular time or how frequently anger is experienced, expressed, suppressed or controlled.” (Spielberger, STAXI-2 Manual, p. 4) The inventory is simple to administer, requiring only about 15 minutes, is normed for adolescents and adults, and is written at a sixth-grade reading level. Although it has not been normed specifically on athletes, its utility makes it ripe for such an extension. Finally, the inventory can be administered individually or in group settings.
The STAXI-2 measures anger along seven major scales and five subscales:
1. State Anger (S-Ang)—the intensity of and extent to which a person feels like expressing anger at a particular time.
a. Feeling Angry (S-Ang/F)—the intensity of the anger that the person is currently experiencing.
b. Feel Like Expressing Anger Verbally (S-Ang/V)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger verbally.
c. Feel Like Expressing Physically (S-Ang/P)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger physically.
2. Trait Anger (T-Ang)—how often angry feelings are experienced over time.
a. Angry Temperament (T-Ang/T)—measures the disposition to experience anger without specific provocation.
b. Angry Reaction (T-Ang/R)—the frequency that angry feelings are experienced in situations that involved frustration or negative evaluations.
3. Anger Expression-Out (AX-O)—how often anger is expressed in verbally or physically aggressive behavior.
4. Anger Expression-In (AX-I)—how often anger is experienced but not expressed.
5. Anger Control-Out (AC-O)—how often the person controls the outward expression of anger.
6. Anger Control-In (AC-I)—how often a person attempts to calm down to control angry feelings.
7. Anger Expression Index (AX Index)—a general index of anger expression.
As can be seen, the STAXI-2 does not just measure anger along different dimensions; it also taps the different methods that subjects report using to manage their anger. In my opinion, it is the most useful anger assessment tool available because it not only describes the person's anger but also gives the sport psychologist the starting point of knowing how the person assesses his or her own anger management tendencies.
Considering the lack of study that anger, aggression, and violence have received in sport psychology as a whole, it is not surprising that few sport-specific anger measures are available. The Bredemeier Athletic Aggression Inventory (BAAGI) (Bredemeier, 1975) deserves some attention because it measures instrumental aggression as well as reactive aggression. Following the theme that instrumental aggression is what we want to reinforce and reactive aggression is related to anger and needs to be curbed, this instrument may prove to have significant utility in future anger management studies of athletes.
One of the newer instruments to be introduced is the Competitive Aggressiveness and Anger Scale (CAAS; Maxwell & Moores, 2007) developed by Jon Maxwell and his colleagues in Hong Kong. Initial findings suggest that the CAAS is a valid scale for the measurement of aggressive tendencies (aggressiveness) and anger in sport. Because it attempts to overcome the shortcomings of other instruments, it has promise.
Developing anger management programs for athletes
The program uses guidelines to identify and manage anger.
The culmination of the previous chapters leads us to the “How To” of anger management. As should be clear by now, getting angry in and of itself, is not a problem. It is the high levels of anger that lead to reactive aggression. The program that is outlined below provides guidelines on how to recognize one's emotion levels and control them. This is done by becoming aware of one's body, how it changes when one is very angry, and different methods to both calm down when very angry as well as ways to avoid getting so angry in the first place. These techniques are truly cognitive and behavioral skills.
Prescreening for Anger Management Participation
Certain groups of people should be evaluated before they are enrolled in an anger management program. When I say evaluated, I do not mean unilaterally ruled out, but prescreened. Certain kinds of people are more likely to benefit than others are from this type of work, and determining who they are is important before beginning any anger management work.
The first question should always be this: Why are you here? If the person is self-referred and motivated—great! If the person shows up because someone said that he or she had to be there—beware! Mandated therapies are notoriously difficult, particularly when people are getting help for behavioral patterns that may be ego syntonic (they like acting that way). People who are doing this work are more likely to benefit from it if they are there because they chose to be there. I am not opposed to discussing with clients the benefits that they can get from anger management training, which certainly includes satisfying the mandate of whoever made the referral. Ultimately, success or failure will come from the client, not from the leader, so the person has the choice of how to proceed. Often, when the issue is posed that way, the client will concede and stay, at least to check it out. If you demand that they stay and participate, you may be wasting each other's time. Sometimes, people do better by delaying their participation until they are ready to do the work.
The second question is this: Who is the client? As in all sport psychology interventions, this question is critical. The issue is about more than knowing who is going to sign the check. The more important issues involve who is expecting results and how they are going to know about them. Sorting this out ahead of time is necessary to avoid confidentiality concerns and ethical conflicts as well to create a safe therapeutic space for the work to be done.
The last area of prescreening, which may include pretest questionnaires or other psychological testing in rare cases, is whether the likely problem for the individual is a skills deficit or severe psychopathology or even psychopathy. Refer to chapter 3 for instruments that may help make this determination.
When I receive an anger management referral, whether clinical or sport related, I ask for information about a recent medical examination and any counseling history. The screening should ask direct questions about past or current pathology, including substance abuse, to ascertain whether the client would be best served in a more controlled arena, such as in individual sessions where clinical problems can be addressed along with the anger issues. If you are not psychologically trained, you should refer the client to someone with the proper background before you start down this path. It could quickly go to places that you never expected.
Individual Versus Group
As Bruce Hale and I explained in our chapter for Shane Murphy's Sport Psych Handbook, both individual and group interventions have pluses and minuses. These attributes should be considered when deciding how to implement anger management skills.
Individual counseling sessions allow greater exploration of incidents and issues that may be embarrassing if addressed in front of others. Furthermore, if a hidden psychopathology may present, especially a trauma-related issue, a group setting could be not only humiliating but also damaging. In addition, current teammates may soon be on opposing teams. Sharing thoughts and feelings may leave a person feeling vulnerable. Exploring those thoughts and feelings one-on-one in a safe environment may promote greater honesty; the lack thereof is a considerable obstacle to progress.
Group interventions offer the opportunity for a group of athletes to learn the skills together. This aspect may be particularly valuable when the intervention is for a whole team or parts thereof. Reinforcement can then occur outside the leader's office, and what is learned can be extended to new environments. In my experience, group sessions can have a significant team-building effect. Athletes learn more about how other athletes think. Through role playing, they can see how their peers react to situations that may also develop in other venues. This area would be another good topic for research. In research on these types of interventions, measures of team cohesion may provide some useful information. By learning each other's triggers, players can help their teammates regain composure and self-control in volatile situations rather than react in a destructive manner.
In no case, however, do I assign any athlete to be responsible for the behavior of another. I do believe that athletes influence each other and contribute to the culture in which decisions are made, but people must ultimately take responsibility for themselves. Collectively, the team takes responsibility for the team.
Finally, although role playing is an excellent way to teach the lessons that follow, and it tends to be more effective than a lecture-based format, the leader must strive to make the program exciting, interactive, and fun. People learn better when they are having fun.
Anger Management
Hey, how do you feel?
Good?
Fine?
OK?
Not bad?
No, how do you feel?
Several basic elements can hinder the effectiveness of anger management programs. The first is that most people do not know how to label their emotions. Any emotion management program must begin with teaching people how to recognize how they feel. Just as important is to recognize that the purpose is not truly to manage anger. The real purpose is to manage behavior associated with anger, or reactive aggression management. The place to start is with emotion labeling because as arousal increases, controlling emotions and related behavior becomes increasingly difficult.
Emotion Labeling
In my opinion, the deficit in emotional labeling has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. The cause may be our susceptibility to the more-is-better approach: “If one is good, then give me a thousand.” We have great difficulty identifying how we feel and how much we feel. After all, emotions have their own experience, which varies slightly from person to person, but they can also be experienced at different intensities, frequencies, and durations.
Nothing about any emotion is inherently good or bad. The judgment that we place on them is the single greatest obstacle to managing them. To expand, parents often tell their children that being angry is not good. Men are socialized as boys to hide their emotions, especially their fears and sadness, although they may be simultaneously confused by the intense football coach who encourages their anger and aggression. The 12-year-old Pop Warner football player who cries may be called a sissy, a girl—as if being a girl is a bad thing—or worse. I will focus more on communication between coaches and athletes later, but at the onset, we must divorce ourselves from the idea that having a particular emotion is good or bad. Making that sort of judgment is complete nonsense.
The way to go about teaching athletes to label their emotions is twofold. The easier way to start is to teach them how their bodies react during emotional changes. They have their bodies with them all the time, they tend to pay close attention to their bodies (in my experience, the only group of clients who pay more attention to how their bodies feel are substance abusers), and they can gain tangible results from controlling the physiological changes associated with emotion.
Ask your athletes to imagine for a moment that they are not young human athletes but instead cute fuzzy bunnies in the woods. (Expect some groaning from your young male athletes, but proceed anyway.) Set up this scenario. You are hopping along and out of nowhere, a giant grizzly bear pops out with its claws bared and saliva dripping from its fangs. It growls as it moves toward its next meal . . . you.
Are you scared?
You bet your butt! How do you know? Think about how your body feels. What must you do to survive? You need either to run or to get ready to fight. In either case, your body needs to prepare for action. The autonomic nervous system is the automatic, involuntary part of the nervous system. It has two parts. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the increase in the following functions, and the parasympathetic nervous system controls the decrease. A loose analogy would be that the sympathetic nervous system is the on switch and the parasympathetic nervous system is the off switch. It is not quite that simple because some bodily functions do not abide by those rules, but in a fight-or-flight situation—in which you must either run or fight to survive—the sympathetic nervous system kicks in full force.
Learn the difference between anger, aggression, and violence
Anger, aggression, and violence can surface while participating in sports and affect how the game is played.
A New Vernacular
I believe that the definitions used in the sport psychology field regarding anger and violence require streamlining. As we go through relevant terminology and definitions that I think should be standardized (if for no other reason than to have pragmatic language that people can agree on), I will explain why I have made refinements to previously used terms.
Anger
Anger is a normal emotion. Anger is neither good nor bad, and no judgment need be attached to it. Some people believe that a problem arises if a person becomes angry. This idea is not true. To pass judgment on anger and condemn those who admit to becoming angry is the equivalent of robbing people of their humanness. Disallowing oneself from any part of the human experience weakens the experience in its totality. Sadness gives a reference point that makes happiness more appreciated. Tension can be better understood when compared with relaxation. It is about time we stopped making value judgments about anger. No one has ever gotten in trouble for becoming angry. You could be furious right now, but no one would know it unless you demonstrated some behavior associated with the anger. The belief that anger is bad is so strongly engrained that people will sometimes deny its existence even when it is spilling out all over the place. We have all heard someone with a red face expel incendiary words accompanied by saliva and then follow up by saying, “I am not angry!” The bad rap that anger has received has made it even more resistant to examination.
Truth be told, anger can be harnessed and used as fuel to assist in performance. Can it interfere with performance? You bet! Does it have to? Absolutely not. I have helped athletes compete harder with greater intensity for longer periods, motivated by their anger. The issue is not a matter of eliminating anger; it is a matter of keeping it at a level where it assists, not detracts from, performance.
Studies have shown that as anger increases, cognitive processing speed goes down, fine motor coordination and sensitivity to pain decrease, and muscle strength often increases. So for some athletes doing some tasks, anger can be helpful. For example, the defensive lineman who must make his way past a blocker to make a tackle might benefit from having some level of anger. For other tasks, anger would be a hindrance. The quarterback who needs to read the defense before deciding which receiver to throw to would likely perform better if he was not angry. In fact, some research supports this thesis. Players at football positions that require a lot of decision making tend to demonstrate lower levels of anger than players at positions that do not.
Therefore, when we talk about anger management for peak performance in sport, we are not always talking about making athletes polite and calm. Rather, we are referring to their ability to self-regulate their emotions to what their tasks require.
Aggression
What does it mean to be aggressive? Definitions that have permeated sport psychology for decades have stated that aggression has harm to another as a goal. It is no wonder that people frown on aggression in sport; it means that someone has to get hurt. This statement is not true. The adverb aggressively describes the method by which people go after their goals. It refers to the tenacity, the hunger, and the determination that people embody when striving for accomplishments. I checked: The women who succeeded on Wall Street climbed the corporate ladder aggressively. Success in life is not just handed to people. They have to want it. They have to go get it themselves. At the heart of Nike's “Just Do It” campaign is the idea of not waiting for it to come to you. Instead, you go from being passive to active and doing it yourself. Aggression is a necessary requirement for success in sport and in life in general.
Aggressive behavior can be broken down into various categories. The delineation that makes the most sense is that between instrumental aggression and reactive aggression.
Instrumental aggression is goal-directed aggression in which harm to another is not the primary goal, although it can be a secondary result of the action. In sport, an example would be the basketball player who slashes to the basket, leaps over a defender, and accidentally catches another defender with an elbow on the way up to scoring two points with a resounding dunk. The goal was to put the ball in the hole, not to harm an opponent. People who participate in sport know that injury is always a possibility. Accidental injuries happen. No blame should be assigned, and nothing in the rules of the game bans these incidents. Instrumental aggression is the hallmark for success in life and in sport and should be encouraged.
Some authors have described instrumental aggression as assertiveness. I believe that in making this distinction, psychologists are trying to soften things up in defense of the position that aggression is bad. Let us examine this for a moment. To be assertive is to stand up for one's rights. In fact, in the psychotherapy world, assertiveness training is used for people who have self-esteem problems. We teach them communication skills (we will revisit this topic later in the book) that will help them effectively and appropriately have their needs met.
To illustrate how assertiveness is not the same as instrumental aggression, consider the following: The tailback is 10 yards out from the goal line. Three defenders block the path between him and six points. Will he assertively communicate to his opponents, “Excuse me, gentlemen, would it be OK if you just acquiesced and allowed me to run past you? After all, it is my right to score this touchdown, you know”? Of course not! The tailback has no entitlement to score. He has no right to win. He succeeds only by aggressively going after his goal. So when you see the tailback launch his body through the air like a missile trying to bowl over the last defender after skillfully dancing his way between the other two, do not think assertive; think Walter Payton—aggressive.
But that is not the whole story on aggression. Another type of aggression is called reactive aggression, sometimes referred to as hostile aggression. Reactive aggression is behavior that has as its primary and sometimes solitary goal to do harm to someone. Usually, this action is in response to a perceived injustice, insult, or wrongdoing. This form of aggression is related to anger and is the behavior that gets athletes in trouble, both on and off the field. An example of reactive aggression may be the pitcher who is furious that the last time a certain batter came to the plate, he hit a 450-foot (140-meter) homer that cleared the bleachers. Still fuming, the pitcher aims his 95 mile-per-hour (150-kilometer-per-hour) fastball between the hitter's shoulder blades.
Violence
Reactive aggression, in its most extreme forms, is violence, but the definition is not reflexive. Not all violence comes from anger and reactive aggression. Violence has, at its root, harm to another as its planned result.
Predatory violence, for example, is behavior in which the hunter seeks the hunted. In the animal world, the stealthy lion waits patiently in the brush for its prey to wander close enough to be ambushed. In the world of serial killers who hunt their victims, predators often do not have an increase in heart rate or sympathetic nervous system activity that usually accompanies anger. Anger is not related to this activity and in fact would interfere with the ability to hunt.
Terry and Jackson (1985) clarified sport violence as harm-inducing behavior outside the rules of sport, bearing no direct relationship to the competitive goals of sport. This definition nicely carved out a type of violence different from society's violence.
In an attempt to explain sport violence, I developed the Abrams model of sports violence (figure 1.1) that reflects the seeming overlap between aggression and violence. Understanding that injury can be part of the game, we can differentiate violence in the same way that we differentiate aggression. Incidental violence is violence that does not have harming another as its sole goal; it is directed toward sport goals. In contrast, reactive or hostile violence has the specific goal of causing harm to someone else.
Both represent behaviors that may go beyond the rules of the sport, but incidental violence is an extension of acceptable behavior. Checking in hockey provides a useful example. The line that differentiates checking from cross-checking or boarding, both of which are penalties, is often blurry. Overzealous players can certainly have their behavior spill over to being illegal. This behavior is different from reactive violence, in which the behavior is retaliatory. This kind of behavior can also be broken down into two categories. The first is the spontaneous response. There are some players who pride themselves on their ability to get inside their opponents' heads and will deliberately provoke them to take them off their game. New York Rangers forward Sean Avery, often described as an agitator, is particularly proficient at this. So, the player provokes the other repeatedly, perhaps by checking them with their stick. Finally, the provoking player checks the first player one too many times, and the player turns and swings the stick at the opponent's head. The response, although extreme, was not planned. This is spontaneous reactive aggression and is directly related to anger. Anger management programs specifically target reducing this type of behavior. More immediately though, the league or organization must penalize, fine, or suspend players engaging in such behavior as it can very easily cause serious injury.
Using psychological inventories to assess anger
Learn about different types of inventory methods and whether or not they work.
Using Psychological Inventories
The hallmark of psychology research is the self-report inventory. Many inventories were developed with the hope of capturing an emotion in a questionnaire. These too present problems.
The first problem with anger inventories is that they tend to be high in what researchers call face validity. The validity of a test is the extent to which it measures what it is supposed to measure. Face validity is the extent to which a test, on the face of it, measures what it is supposed to. Subjects who take tests that are high in face validity can easily tell what the researcher is measuring. For an emotional state like anger, which many people recognize has a negative connotation; subjects can provide answers that depict themselves in a favorable light. The test is easily faked. For that matter, if a subject wants the researcher to draw a particular conclusion, he or she can make the test show those results. Subjects respond in the ways that they do on such tests for many reasons. Those with an acquiescence bias will give the answer that they believe the researcher wants. Some want to paint themselves in a positive light. Some really do not pay attention to how they feel, and their self-report may not be based on reality. Some people lie. This may surprise you, but some people who lie do not have a specific reason to do so. A common false assumption is that people lie only if they have a good reason to do so, if they have something to gain. But, people lie for the fun of it, for the excitement of it, because they enjoy deceiving people, or for no reason at all. And the problem is that on these tests, it is hard to tell when someone is lying if the person lies consistently throughout the answers.
The second problem with anger scales is that a one-to-one correlation does not exist between measures on self-report inventories and behavior. Does every person who scores high on anger scales get in fights? No. One might even hypothesize that athletes who scores high on a self-report measure are less likely to act out because they have some awareness of their anger. Moreover, many of these scales were originally developed to measure pathology. Suppose that a student scored higher than everyone else in the class but her or his score did not reach the threshold of where anger is considered a problem. Can we say that this student is angrier than the other students? Maybe, but what does it mean? Not much.
The last problem with self-report measures is that even the ones that measure anger in state (being in an angry state right now) and trait (pervasive pattern of anger) dimensions, if not given when respondents are angry, may not reflect the true intensity of their emotions.
Nonetheless, self-report questionnaires are probably the best standardized tools that we have. Although several are available, I am going to focus on two that seem to be the most commonly used in the sport and clinical psychology literatures.
Profile of Moods States (POMS)
Originally developed in 1971 by McNair, Lorr, and Droppleman, the Profile of Mood States (POMS) has been cited in approximately 300 articles in the sport and exercise psychology literature. The test is a self-report measure in which subjects report on a Likert scale to what degree they experience the word describing an emotional state. The 65 words or phrases load into six mood states: tension, depression, anger, vigor, fatigue, and confusion. These six states can then be charted and their relative elevations noted.
Early research by William Morgan in the 1970s yielded the “iceberg profile” of elite athletes. While consulting with the United States Olympic Committee, Morgan found that successful elite athletes could be differentiated from unsuccessful candidates by this profile. Successful athletes had an elevation in vigor but much lower values for all the other mood states. This model has come under greater scrutiny over time, most notably in a meta-analysis of the articles that studied the iceberg profile (Rowley et al., 1995). Although that study found the iceberg profile to be a weak predictor of athletic success, the Profile of Mood States is still widely used and is currently found in approximately 1,500 published articles when you include studies outside of sport psychology as well.
The ease of administration paired with its established place in the sport psychology world makes the POMS one of the two instruments of choice in measuring anger in sport.
State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2)
The State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2), developed by psychologist Charles Spielberger, is the gold standard for anger assessment. STAXI-2 is a self-report inventory that measures anger in multiple dimensions. By responding to 57 items on a four-point scale (with 1 equating to “not at all” or “almost never” and 4 equating to “very much so” or “almost always”) assessment of the subjects' anger includes “either the intensity of their angry feelings at a particular time or how frequently anger is experienced, expressed, suppressed or controlled.” (Spielberger, STAXI-2 Manual, p. 4) The inventory is simple to administer, requiring only about 15 minutes, is normed for adolescents and adults, and is written at a sixth-grade reading level. Although it has not been normed specifically on athletes, its utility makes it ripe for such an extension. Finally, the inventory can be administered individually or in group settings.
The STAXI-2 measures anger along seven major scales and five subscales:
1. State Anger (S-Ang)—the intensity of and extent to which a person feels like expressing anger at a particular time.
a. Feeling Angry (S-Ang/F)—the intensity of the anger that the person is currently experiencing.
b. Feel Like Expressing Anger Verbally (S-Ang/V)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger verbally.
c. Feel Like Expressing Physically (S-Ang/P)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger physically.
2. Trait Anger (T-Ang)—how often angry feelings are experienced over time.
a. Angry Temperament (T-Ang/T)—measures the disposition to experience anger without specific provocation.
b. Angry Reaction (T-Ang/R)—the frequency that angry feelings are experienced in situations that involved frustration or negative evaluations.
3. Anger Expression-Out (AX-O)—how often anger is expressed in verbally or physically aggressive behavior.
4. Anger Expression-In (AX-I)—how often anger is experienced but not expressed.
5. Anger Control-Out (AC-O)—how often the person controls the outward expression of anger.
6. Anger Control-In (AC-I)—how often a person attempts to calm down to control angry feelings.
7. Anger Expression Index (AX Index)—a general index of anger expression.
As can be seen, the STAXI-2 does not just measure anger along different dimensions; it also taps the different methods that subjects report using to manage their anger. In my opinion, it is the most useful anger assessment tool available because it not only describes the person's anger but also gives the sport psychologist the starting point of knowing how the person assesses his or her own anger management tendencies.
Considering the lack of study that anger, aggression, and violence have received in sport psychology as a whole, it is not surprising that few sport-specific anger measures are available. The Bredemeier Athletic Aggression Inventory (BAAGI) (Bredemeier, 1975) deserves some attention because it measures instrumental aggression as well as reactive aggression. Following the theme that instrumental aggression is what we want to reinforce and reactive aggression is related to anger and needs to be curbed, this instrument may prove to have significant utility in future anger management studies of athletes.
One of the newer instruments to be introduced is the Competitive Aggressiveness and Anger Scale (CAAS; Maxwell & Moores, 2007) developed by Jon Maxwell and his colleagues in Hong Kong. Initial findings suggest that the CAAS is a valid scale for the measurement of aggressive tendencies (aggressiveness) and anger in sport. Because it attempts to overcome the shortcomings of other instruments, it has promise.
Developing anger management programs for athletes
The program uses guidelines to identify and manage anger.
The culmination of the previous chapters leads us to the “How To” of anger management. As should be clear by now, getting angry in and of itself, is not a problem. It is the high levels of anger that lead to reactive aggression. The program that is outlined below provides guidelines on how to recognize one's emotion levels and control them. This is done by becoming aware of one's body, how it changes when one is very angry, and different methods to both calm down when very angry as well as ways to avoid getting so angry in the first place. These techniques are truly cognitive and behavioral skills.
Prescreening for Anger Management Participation
Certain groups of people should be evaluated before they are enrolled in an anger management program. When I say evaluated, I do not mean unilaterally ruled out, but prescreened. Certain kinds of people are more likely to benefit than others are from this type of work, and determining who they are is important before beginning any anger management work.
The first question should always be this: Why are you here? If the person is self-referred and motivated—great! If the person shows up because someone said that he or she had to be there—beware! Mandated therapies are notoriously difficult, particularly when people are getting help for behavioral patterns that may be ego syntonic (they like acting that way). People who are doing this work are more likely to benefit from it if they are there because they chose to be there. I am not opposed to discussing with clients the benefits that they can get from anger management training, which certainly includes satisfying the mandate of whoever made the referral. Ultimately, success or failure will come from the client, not from the leader, so the person has the choice of how to proceed. Often, when the issue is posed that way, the client will concede and stay, at least to check it out. If you demand that they stay and participate, you may be wasting each other's time. Sometimes, people do better by delaying their participation until they are ready to do the work.
The second question is this: Who is the client? As in all sport psychology interventions, this question is critical. The issue is about more than knowing who is going to sign the check. The more important issues involve who is expecting results and how they are going to know about them. Sorting this out ahead of time is necessary to avoid confidentiality concerns and ethical conflicts as well to create a safe therapeutic space for the work to be done.
The last area of prescreening, which may include pretest questionnaires or other psychological testing in rare cases, is whether the likely problem for the individual is a skills deficit or severe psychopathology or even psychopathy. Refer to chapter 3 for instruments that may help make this determination.
When I receive an anger management referral, whether clinical or sport related, I ask for information about a recent medical examination and any counseling history. The screening should ask direct questions about past or current pathology, including substance abuse, to ascertain whether the client would be best served in a more controlled arena, such as in individual sessions where clinical problems can be addressed along with the anger issues. If you are not psychologically trained, you should refer the client to someone with the proper background before you start down this path. It could quickly go to places that you never expected.
Individual Versus Group
As Bruce Hale and I explained in our chapter for Shane Murphy's Sport Psych Handbook, both individual and group interventions have pluses and minuses. These attributes should be considered when deciding how to implement anger management skills.
Individual counseling sessions allow greater exploration of incidents and issues that may be embarrassing if addressed in front of others. Furthermore, if a hidden psychopathology may present, especially a trauma-related issue, a group setting could be not only humiliating but also damaging. In addition, current teammates may soon be on opposing teams. Sharing thoughts and feelings may leave a person feeling vulnerable. Exploring those thoughts and feelings one-on-one in a safe environment may promote greater honesty; the lack thereof is a considerable obstacle to progress.
Group interventions offer the opportunity for a group of athletes to learn the skills together. This aspect may be particularly valuable when the intervention is for a whole team or parts thereof. Reinforcement can then occur outside the leader's office, and what is learned can be extended to new environments. In my experience, group sessions can have a significant team-building effect. Athletes learn more about how other athletes think. Through role playing, they can see how their peers react to situations that may also develop in other venues. This area would be another good topic for research. In research on these types of interventions, measures of team cohesion may provide some useful information. By learning each other's triggers, players can help their teammates regain composure and self-control in volatile situations rather than react in a destructive manner.
In no case, however, do I assign any athlete to be responsible for the behavior of another. I do believe that athletes influence each other and contribute to the culture in which decisions are made, but people must ultimately take responsibility for themselves. Collectively, the team takes responsibility for the team.
Finally, although role playing is an excellent way to teach the lessons that follow, and it tends to be more effective than a lecture-based format, the leader must strive to make the program exciting, interactive, and fun. People learn better when they are having fun.
Anger Management
Hey, how do you feel?
Good?
Fine?
OK?
Not bad?
No, how do you feel?
Several basic elements can hinder the effectiveness of anger management programs. The first is that most people do not know how to label their emotions. Any emotion management program must begin with teaching people how to recognize how they feel. Just as important is to recognize that the purpose is not truly to manage anger. The real purpose is to manage behavior associated with anger, or reactive aggression management. The place to start is with emotion labeling because as arousal increases, controlling emotions and related behavior becomes increasingly difficult.
Emotion Labeling
In my opinion, the deficit in emotional labeling has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. The cause may be our susceptibility to the more-is-better approach: “If one is good, then give me a thousand.” We have great difficulty identifying how we feel and how much we feel. After all, emotions have their own experience, which varies slightly from person to person, but they can also be experienced at different intensities, frequencies, and durations.
Nothing about any emotion is inherently good or bad. The judgment that we place on them is the single greatest obstacle to managing them. To expand, parents often tell their children that being angry is not good. Men are socialized as boys to hide their emotions, especially their fears and sadness, although they may be simultaneously confused by the intense football coach who encourages their anger and aggression. The 12-year-old Pop Warner football player who cries may be called a sissy, a girl—as if being a girl is a bad thing—or worse. I will focus more on communication between coaches and athletes later, but at the onset, we must divorce ourselves from the idea that having a particular emotion is good or bad. Making that sort of judgment is complete nonsense.
The way to go about teaching athletes to label their emotions is twofold. The easier way to start is to teach them how their bodies react during emotional changes. They have their bodies with them all the time, they tend to pay close attention to their bodies (in my experience, the only group of clients who pay more attention to how their bodies feel are substance abusers), and they can gain tangible results from controlling the physiological changes associated with emotion.
Ask your athletes to imagine for a moment that they are not young human athletes but instead cute fuzzy bunnies in the woods. (Expect some groaning from your young male athletes, but proceed anyway.) Set up this scenario. You are hopping along and out of nowhere, a giant grizzly bear pops out with its claws bared and saliva dripping from its fangs. It growls as it moves toward its next meal . . . you.
Are you scared?
You bet your butt! How do you know? Think about how your body feels. What must you do to survive? You need either to run or to get ready to fight. In either case, your body needs to prepare for action. The autonomic nervous system is the automatic, involuntary part of the nervous system. It has two parts. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the increase in the following functions, and the parasympathetic nervous system controls the decrease. A loose analogy would be that the sympathetic nervous system is the on switch and the parasympathetic nervous system is the off switch. It is not quite that simple because some bodily functions do not abide by those rules, but in a fight-or-flight situation—in which you must either run or fight to survive—the sympathetic nervous system kicks in full force.
Learn the difference between anger, aggression, and violence
Anger, aggression, and violence can surface while participating in sports and affect how the game is played.
A New Vernacular
I believe that the definitions used in the sport psychology field regarding anger and violence require streamlining. As we go through relevant terminology and definitions that I think should be standardized (if for no other reason than to have pragmatic language that people can agree on), I will explain why I have made refinements to previously used terms.
Anger
Anger is a normal emotion. Anger is neither good nor bad, and no judgment need be attached to it. Some people believe that a problem arises if a person becomes angry. This idea is not true. To pass judgment on anger and condemn those who admit to becoming angry is the equivalent of robbing people of their humanness. Disallowing oneself from any part of the human experience weakens the experience in its totality. Sadness gives a reference point that makes happiness more appreciated. Tension can be better understood when compared with relaxation. It is about time we stopped making value judgments about anger. No one has ever gotten in trouble for becoming angry. You could be furious right now, but no one would know it unless you demonstrated some behavior associated with the anger. The belief that anger is bad is so strongly engrained that people will sometimes deny its existence even when it is spilling out all over the place. We have all heard someone with a red face expel incendiary words accompanied by saliva and then follow up by saying, “I am not angry!” The bad rap that anger has received has made it even more resistant to examination.
Truth be told, anger can be harnessed and used as fuel to assist in performance. Can it interfere with performance? You bet! Does it have to? Absolutely not. I have helped athletes compete harder with greater intensity for longer periods, motivated by their anger. The issue is not a matter of eliminating anger; it is a matter of keeping it at a level where it assists, not detracts from, performance.
Studies have shown that as anger increases, cognitive processing speed goes down, fine motor coordination and sensitivity to pain decrease, and muscle strength often increases. So for some athletes doing some tasks, anger can be helpful. For example, the defensive lineman who must make his way past a blocker to make a tackle might benefit from having some level of anger. For other tasks, anger would be a hindrance. The quarterback who needs to read the defense before deciding which receiver to throw to would likely perform better if he was not angry. In fact, some research supports this thesis. Players at football positions that require a lot of decision making tend to demonstrate lower levels of anger than players at positions that do not.
Therefore, when we talk about anger management for peak performance in sport, we are not always talking about making athletes polite and calm. Rather, we are referring to their ability to self-regulate their emotions to what their tasks require.
Aggression
What does it mean to be aggressive? Definitions that have permeated sport psychology for decades have stated that aggression has harm to another as a goal. It is no wonder that people frown on aggression in sport; it means that someone has to get hurt. This statement is not true. The adverb aggressively describes the method by which people go after their goals. It refers to the tenacity, the hunger, and the determination that people embody when striving for accomplishments. I checked: The women who succeeded on Wall Street climbed the corporate ladder aggressively. Success in life is not just handed to people. They have to want it. They have to go get it themselves. At the heart of Nike's “Just Do It” campaign is the idea of not waiting for it to come to you. Instead, you go from being passive to active and doing it yourself. Aggression is a necessary requirement for success in sport and in life in general.
Aggressive behavior can be broken down into various categories. The delineation that makes the most sense is that between instrumental aggression and reactive aggression.
Instrumental aggression is goal-directed aggression in which harm to another is not the primary goal, although it can be a secondary result of the action. In sport, an example would be the basketball player who slashes to the basket, leaps over a defender, and accidentally catches another defender with an elbow on the way up to scoring two points with a resounding dunk. The goal was to put the ball in the hole, not to harm an opponent. People who participate in sport know that injury is always a possibility. Accidental injuries happen. No blame should be assigned, and nothing in the rules of the game bans these incidents. Instrumental aggression is the hallmark for success in life and in sport and should be encouraged.
Some authors have described instrumental aggression as assertiveness. I believe that in making this distinction, psychologists are trying to soften things up in defense of the position that aggression is bad. Let us examine this for a moment. To be assertive is to stand up for one's rights. In fact, in the psychotherapy world, assertiveness training is used for people who have self-esteem problems. We teach them communication skills (we will revisit this topic later in the book) that will help them effectively and appropriately have their needs met.
To illustrate how assertiveness is not the same as instrumental aggression, consider the following: The tailback is 10 yards out from the goal line. Three defenders block the path between him and six points. Will he assertively communicate to his opponents, “Excuse me, gentlemen, would it be OK if you just acquiesced and allowed me to run past you? After all, it is my right to score this touchdown, you know”? Of course not! The tailback has no entitlement to score. He has no right to win. He succeeds only by aggressively going after his goal. So when you see the tailback launch his body through the air like a missile trying to bowl over the last defender after skillfully dancing his way between the other two, do not think assertive; think Walter Payton—aggressive.
But that is not the whole story on aggression. Another type of aggression is called reactive aggression, sometimes referred to as hostile aggression. Reactive aggression is behavior that has as its primary and sometimes solitary goal to do harm to someone. Usually, this action is in response to a perceived injustice, insult, or wrongdoing. This form of aggression is related to anger and is the behavior that gets athletes in trouble, both on and off the field. An example of reactive aggression may be the pitcher who is furious that the last time a certain batter came to the plate, he hit a 450-foot (140-meter) homer that cleared the bleachers. Still fuming, the pitcher aims his 95 mile-per-hour (150-kilometer-per-hour) fastball between the hitter's shoulder blades.
Violence
Reactive aggression, in its most extreme forms, is violence, but the definition is not reflexive. Not all violence comes from anger and reactive aggression. Violence has, at its root, harm to another as its planned result.
Predatory violence, for example, is behavior in which the hunter seeks the hunted. In the animal world, the stealthy lion waits patiently in the brush for its prey to wander close enough to be ambushed. In the world of serial killers who hunt their victims, predators often do not have an increase in heart rate or sympathetic nervous system activity that usually accompanies anger. Anger is not related to this activity and in fact would interfere with the ability to hunt.
Terry and Jackson (1985) clarified sport violence as harm-inducing behavior outside the rules of sport, bearing no direct relationship to the competitive goals of sport. This definition nicely carved out a type of violence different from society's violence.
In an attempt to explain sport violence, I developed the Abrams model of sports violence (figure 1.1) that reflects the seeming overlap between aggression and violence. Understanding that injury can be part of the game, we can differentiate violence in the same way that we differentiate aggression. Incidental violence is violence that does not have harming another as its sole goal; it is directed toward sport goals. In contrast, reactive or hostile violence has the specific goal of causing harm to someone else.
Both represent behaviors that may go beyond the rules of the sport, but incidental violence is an extension of acceptable behavior. Checking in hockey provides a useful example. The line that differentiates checking from cross-checking or boarding, both of which are penalties, is often blurry. Overzealous players can certainly have their behavior spill over to being illegal. This behavior is different from reactive violence, in which the behavior is retaliatory. This kind of behavior can also be broken down into two categories. The first is the spontaneous response. There are some players who pride themselves on their ability to get inside their opponents' heads and will deliberately provoke them to take them off their game. New York Rangers forward Sean Avery, often described as an agitator, is particularly proficient at this. So, the player provokes the other repeatedly, perhaps by checking them with their stick. Finally, the provoking player checks the first player one too many times, and the player turns and swings the stick at the opponent's head. The response, although extreme, was not planned. This is spontaneous reactive aggression and is directly related to anger. Anger management programs specifically target reducing this type of behavior. More immediately though, the league or organization must penalize, fine, or suspend players engaging in such behavior as it can very easily cause serious injury.
Using psychological inventories to assess anger
Learn about different types of inventory methods and whether or not they work.
Using Psychological Inventories
The hallmark of psychology research is the self-report inventory. Many inventories were developed with the hope of capturing an emotion in a questionnaire. These too present problems.
The first problem with anger inventories is that they tend to be high in what researchers call face validity. The validity of a test is the extent to which it measures what it is supposed to measure. Face validity is the extent to which a test, on the face of it, measures what it is supposed to. Subjects who take tests that are high in face validity can easily tell what the researcher is measuring. For an emotional state like anger, which many people recognize has a negative connotation; subjects can provide answers that depict themselves in a favorable light. The test is easily faked. For that matter, if a subject wants the researcher to draw a particular conclusion, he or she can make the test show those results. Subjects respond in the ways that they do on such tests for many reasons. Those with an acquiescence bias will give the answer that they believe the researcher wants. Some want to paint themselves in a positive light. Some really do not pay attention to how they feel, and their self-report may not be based on reality. Some people lie. This may surprise you, but some people who lie do not have a specific reason to do so. A common false assumption is that people lie only if they have a good reason to do so, if they have something to gain. But, people lie for the fun of it, for the excitement of it, because they enjoy deceiving people, or for no reason at all. And the problem is that on these tests, it is hard to tell when someone is lying if the person lies consistently throughout the answers.
The second problem with anger scales is that a one-to-one correlation does not exist between measures on self-report inventories and behavior. Does every person who scores high on anger scales get in fights? No. One might even hypothesize that athletes who scores high on a self-report measure are less likely to act out because they have some awareness of their anger. Moreover, many of these scales were originally developed to measure pathology. Suppose that a student scored higher than everyone else in the class but her or his score did not reach the threshold of where anger is considered a problem. Can we say that this student is angrier than the other students? Maybe, but what does it mean? Not much.
The last problem with self-report measures is that even the ones that measure anger in state (being in an angry state right now) and trait (pervasive pattern of anger) dimensions, if not given when respondents are angry, may not reflect the true intensity of their emotions.
Nonetheless, self-report questionnaires are probably the best standardized tools that we have. Although several are available, I am going to focus on two that seem to be the most commonly used in the sport and clinical psychology literatures.
Profile of Moods States (POMS)
Originally developed in 1971 by McNair, Lorr, and Droppleman, the Profile of Mood States (POMS) has been cited in approximately 300 articles in the sport and exercise psychology literature. The test is a self-report measure in which subjects report on a Likert scale to what degree they experience the word describing an emotional state. The 65 words or phrases load into six mood states: tension, depression, anger, vigor, fatigue, and confusion. These six states can then be charted and their relative elevations noted.
Early research by William Morgan in the 1970s yielded the “iceberg profile” of elite athletes. While consulting with the United States Olympic Committee, Morgan found that successful elite athletes could be differentiated from unsuccessful candidates by this profile. Successful athletes had an elevation in vigor but much lower values for all the other mood states. This model has come under greater scrutiny over time, most notably in a meta-analysis of the articles that studied the iceberg profile (Rowley et al., 1995). Although that study found the iceberg profile to be a weak predictor of athletic success, the Profile of Mood States is still widely used and is currently found in approximately 1,500 published articles when you include studies outside of sport psychology as well.
The ease of administration paired with its established place in the sport psychology world makes the POMS one of the two instruments of choice in measuring anger in sport.
State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2)
The State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2), developed by psychologist Charles Spielberger, is the gold standard for anger assessment. STAXI-2 is a self-report inventory that measures anger in multiple dimensions. By responding to 57 items on a four-point scale (with 1 equating to “not at all” or “almost never” and 4 equating to “very much so” or “almost always”) assessment of the subjects' anger includes “either the intensity of their angry feelings at a particular time or how frequently anger is experienced, expressed, suppressed or controlled.” (Spielberger, STAXI-2 Manual, p. 4) The inventory is simple to administer, requiring only about 15 minutes, is normed for adolescents and adults, and is written at a sixth-grade reading level. Although it has not been normed specifically on athletes, its utility makes it ripe for such an extension. Finally, the inventory can be administered individually or in group settings.
The STAXI-2 measures anger along seven major scales and five subscales:
1. State Anger (S-Ang)—the intensity of and extent to which a person feels like expressing anger at a particular time.
a. Feeling Angry (S-Ang/F)—the intensity of the anger that the person is currently experiencing.
b. Feel Like Expressing Anger Verbally (S-Ang/V)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger verbally.
c. Feel Like Expressing Physically (S-Ang/P)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger physically.
2. Trait Anger (T-Ang)—how often angry feelings are experienced over time.
a. Angry Temperament (T-Ang/T)—measures the disposition to experience anger without specific provocation.
b. Angry Reaction (T-Ang/R)—the frequency that angry feelings are experienced in situations that involved frustration or negative evaluations.
3. Anger Expression-Out (AX-O)—how often anger is expressed in verbally or physically aggressive behavior.
4. Anger Expression-In (AX-I)—how often anger is experienced but not expressed.
5. Anger Control-Out (AC-O)—how often the person controls the outward expression of anger.
6. Anger Control-In (AC-I)—how often a person attempts to calm down to control angry feelings.
7. Anger Expression Index (AX Index)—a general index of anger expression.
As can be seen, the STAXI-2 does not just measure anger along different dimensions; it also taps the different methods that subjects report using to manage their anger. In my opinion, it is the most useful anger assessment tool available because it not only describes the person's anger but also gives the sport psychologist the starting point of knowing how the person assesses his or her own anger management tendencies.
Considering the lack of study that anger, aggression, and violence have received in sport psychology as a whole, it is not surprising that few sport-specific anger measures are available. The Bredemeier Athletic Aggression Inventory (BAAGI) (Bredemeier, 1975) deserves some attention because it measures instrumental aggression as well as reactive aggression. Following the theme that instrumental aggression is what we want to reinforce and reactive aggression is related to anger and needs to be curbed, this instrument may prove to have significant utility in future anger management studies of athletes.
One of the newer instruments to be introduced is the Competitive Aggressiveness and Anger Scale (CAAS; Maxwell & Moores, 2007) developed by Jon Maxwell and his colleagues in Hong Kong. Initial findings suggest that the CAAS is a valid scale for the measurement of aggressive tendencies (aggressiveness) and anger in sport. Because it attempts to overcome the shortcomings of other instruments, it has promise.
Developing anger management programs for athletes
The program uses guidelines to identify and manage anger.
The culmination of the previous chapters leads us to the “How To” of anger management. As should be clear by now, getting angry in and of itself, is not a problem. It is the high levels of anger that lead to reactive aggression. The program that is outlined below provides guidelines on how to recognize one's emotion levels and control them. This is done by becoming aware of one's body, how it changes when one is very angry, and different methods to both calm down when very angry as well as ways to avoid getting so angry in the first place. These techniques are truly cognitive and behavioral skills.
Prescreening for Anger Management Participation
Certain groups of people should be evaluated before they are enrolled in an anger management program. When I say evaluated, I do not mean unilaterally ruled out, but prescreened. Certain kinds of people are more likely to benefit than others are from this type of work, and determining who they are is important before beginning any anger management work.
The first question should always be this: Why are you here? If the person is self-referred and motivated—great! If the person shows up because someone said that he or she had to be there—beware! Mandated therapies are notoriously difficult, particularly when people are getting help for behavioral patterns that may be ego syntonic (they like acting that way). People who are doing this work are more likely to benefit from it if they are there because they chose to be there. I am not opposed to discussing with clients the benefits that they can get from anger management training, which certainly includes satisfying the mandate of whoever made the referral. Ultimately, success or failure will come from the client, not from the leader, so the person has the choice of how to proceed. Often, when the issue is posed that way, the client will concede and stay, at least to check it out. If you demand that they stay and participate, you may be wasting each other's time. Sometimes, people do better by delaying their participation until they are ready to do the work.
The second question is this: Who is the client? As in all sport psychology interventions, this question is critical. The issue is about more than knowing who is going to sign the check. The more important issues involve who is expecting results and how they are going to know about them. Sorting this out ahead of time is necessary to avoid confidentiality concerns and ethical conflicts as well to create a safe therapeutic space for the work to be done.
The last area of prescreening, which may include pretest questionnaires or other psychological testing in rare cases, is whether the likely problem for the individual is a skills deficit or severe psychopathology or even psychopathy. Refer to chapter 3 for instruments that may help make this determination.
When I receive an anger management referral, whether clinical or sport related, I ask for information about a recent medical examination and any counseling history. The screening should ask direct questions about past or current pathology, including substance abuse, to ascertain whether the client would be best served in a more controlled arena, such as in individual sessions where clinical problems can be addressed along with the anger issues. If you are not psychologically trained, you should refer the client to someone with the proper background before you start down this path. It could quickly go to places that you never expected.
Individual Versus Group
As Bruce Hale and I explained in our chapter for Shane Murphy's Sport Psych Handbook, both individual and group interventions have pluses and minuses. These attributes should be considered when deciding how to implement anger management skills.
Individual counseling sessions allow greater exploration of incidents and issues that may be embarrassing if addressed in front of others. Furthermore, if a hidden psychopathology may present, especially a trauma-related issue, a group setting could be not only humiliating but also damaging. In addition, current teammates may soon be on opposing teams. Sharing thoughts and feelings may leave a person feeling vulnerable. Exploring those thoughts and feelings one-on-one in a safe environment may promote greater honesty; the lack thereof is a considerable obstacle to progress.
Group interventions offer the opportunity for a group of athletes to learn the skills together. This aspect may be particularly valuable when the intervention is for a whole team or parts thereof. Reinforcement can then occur outside the leader's office, and what is learned can be extended to new environments. In my experience, group sessions can have a significant team-building effect. Athletes learn more about how other athletes think. Through role playing, they can see how their peers react to situations that may also develop in other venues. This area would be another good topic for research. In research on these types of interventions, measures of team cohesion may provide some useful information. By learning each other's triggers, players can help their teammates regain composure and self-control in volatile situations rather than react in a destructive manner.
In no case, however, do I assign any athlete to be responsible for the behavior of another. I do believe that athletes influence each other and contribute to the culture in which decisions are made, but people must ultimately take responsibility for themselves. Collectively, the team takes responsibility for the team.
Finally, although role playing is an excellent way to teach the lessons that follow, and it tends to be more effective than a lecture-based format, the leader must strive to make the program exciting, interactive, and fun. People learn better when they are having fun.
Anger Management
Hey, how do you feel?
Good?
Fine?
OK?
Not bad?
No, how do you feel?
Several basic elements can hinder the effectiveness of anger management programs. The first is that most people do not know how to label their emotions. Any emotion management program must begin with teaching people how to recognize how they feel. Just as important is to recognize that the purpose is not truly to manage anger. The real purpose is to manage behavior associated with anger, or reactive aggression management. The place to start is with emotion labeling because as arousal increases, controlling emotions and related behavior becomes increasingly difficult.
Emotion Labeling
In my opinion, the deficit in emotional labeling has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. The cause may be our susceptibility to the more-is-better approach: “If one is good, then give me a thousand.” We have great difficulty identifying how we feel and how much we feel. After all, emotions have their own experience, which varies slightly from person to person, but they can also be experienced at different intensities, frequencies, and durations.
Nothing about any emotion is inherently good or bad. The judgment that we place on them is the single greatest obstacle to managing them. To expand, parents often tell their children that being angry is not good. Men are socialized as boys to hide their emotions, especially their fears and sadness, although they may be simultaneously confused by the intense football coach who encourages their anger and aggression. The 12-year-old Pop Warner football player who cries may be called a sissy, a girl—as if being a girl is a bad thing—or worse. I will focus more on communication between coaches and athletes later, but at the onset, we must divorce ourselves from the idea that having a particular emotion is good or bad. Making that sort of judgment is complete nonsense.
The way to go about teaching athletes to label their emotions is twofold. The easier way to start is to teach them how their bodies react during emotional changes. They have their bodies with them all the time, they tend to pay close attention to their bodies (in my experience, the only group of clients who pay more attention to how their bodies feel are substance abusers), and they can gain tangible results from controlling the physiological changes associated with emotion.
Ask your athletes to imagine for a moment that they are not young human athletes but instead cute fuzzy bunnies in the woods. (Expect some groaning from your young male athletes, but proceed anyway.) Set up this scenario. You are hopping along and out of nowhere, a giant grizzly bear pops out with its claws bared and saliva dripping from its fangs. It growls as it moves toward its next meal . . . you.
Are you scared?
You bet your butt! How do you know? Think about how your body feels. What must you do to survive? You need either to run or to get ready to fight. In either case, your body needs to prepare for action. The autonomic nervous system is the automatic, involuntary part of the nervous system. It has two parts. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the increase in the following functions, and the parasympathetic nervous system controls the decrease. A loose analogy would be that the sympathetic nervous system is the on switch and the parasympathetic nervous system is the off switch. It is not quite that simple because some bodily functions do not abide by those rules, but in a fight-or-flight situation—in which you must either run or fight to survive—the sympathetic nervous system kicks in full force.
Learn the difference between anger, aggression, and violence
Anger, aggression, and violence can surface while participating in sports and affect how the game is played.
A New Vernacular
I believe that the definitions used in the sport psychology field regarding anger and violence require streamlining. As we go through relevant terminology and definitions that I think should be standardized (if for no other reason than to have pragmatic language that people can agree on), I will explain why I have made refinements to previously used terms.
Anger
Anger is a normal emotion. Anger is neither good nor bad, and no judgment need be attached to it. Some people believe that a problem arises if a person becomes angry. This idea is not true. To pass judgment on anger and condemn those who admit to becoming angry is the equivalent of robbing people of their humanness. Disallowing oneself from any part of the human experience weakens the experience in its totality. Sadness gives a reference point that makes happiness more appreciated. Tension can be better understood when compared with relaxation. It is about time we stopped making value judgments about anger. No one has ever gotten in trouble for becoming angry. You could be furious right now, but no one would know it unless you demonstrated some behavior associated with the anger. The belief that anger is bad is so strongly engrained that people will sometimes deny its existence even when it is spilling out all over the place. We have all heard someone with a red face expel incendiary words accompanied by saliva and then follow up by saying, “I am not angry!” The bad rap that anger has received has made it even more resistant to examination.
Truth be told, anger can be harnessed and used as fuel to assist in performance. Can it interfere with performance? You bet! Does it have to? Absolutely not. I have helped athletes compete harder with greater intensity for longer periods, motivated by their anger. The issue is not a matter of eliminating anger; it is a matter of keeping it at a level where it assists, not detracts from, performance.
Studies have shown that as anger increases, cognitive processing speed goes down, fine motor coordination and sensitivity to pain decrease, and muscle strength often increases. So for some athletes doing some tasks, anger can be helpful. For example, the defensive lineman who must make his way past a blocker to make a tackle might benefit from having some level of anger. For other tasks, anger would be a hindrance. The quarterback who needs to read the defense before deciding which receiver to throw to would likely perform better if he was not angry. In fact, some research supports this thesis. Players at football positions that require a lot of decision making tend to demonstrate lower levels of anger than players at positions that do not.
Therefore, when we talk about anger management for peak performance in sport, we are not always talking about making athletes polite and calm. Rather, we are referring to their ability to self-regulate their emotions to what their tasks require.
Aggression
What does it mean to be aggressive? Definitions that have permeated sport psychology for decades have stated that aggression has harm to another as a goal. It is no wonder that people frown on aggression in sport; it means that someone has to get hurt. This statement is not true. The adverb aggressively describes the method by which people go after their goals. It refers to the tenacity, the hunger, and the determination that people embody when striving for accomplishments. I checked: The women who succeeded on Wall Street climbed the corporate ladder aggressively. Success in life is not just handed to people. They have to want it. They have to go get it themselves. At the heart of Nike's “Just Do It” campaign is the idea of not waiting for it to come to you. Instead, you go from being passive to active and doing it yourself. Aggression is a necessary requirement for success in sport and in life in general.
Aggressive behavior can be broken down into various categories. The delineation that makes the most sense is that between instrumental aggression and reactive aggression.
Instrumental aggression is goal-directed aggression in which harm to another is not the primary goal, although it can be a secondary result of the action. In sport, an example would be the basketball player who slashes to the basket, leaps over a defender, and accidentally catches another defender with an elbow on the way up to scoring two points with a resounding dunk. The goal was to put the ball in the hole, not to harm an opponent. People who participate in sport know that injury is always a possibility. Accidental injuries happen. No blame should be assigned, and nothing in the rules of the game bans these incidents. Instrumental aggression is the hallmark for success in life and in sport and should be encouraged.
Some authors have described instrumental aggression as assertiveness. I believe that in making this distinction, psychologists are trying to soften things up in defense of the position that aggression is bad. Let us examine this for a moment. To be assertive is to stand up for one's rights. In fact, in the psychotherapy world, assertiveness training is used for people who have self-esteem problems. We teach them communication skills (we will revisit this topic later in the book) that will help them effectively and appropriately have their needs met.
To illustrate how assertiveness is not the same as instrumental aggression, consider the following: The tailback is 10 yards out from the goal line. Three defenders block the path between him and six points. Will he assertively communicate to his opponents, “Excuse me, gentlemen, would it be OK if you just acquiesced and allowed me to run past you? After all, it is my right to score this touchdown, you know”? Of course not! The tailback has no entitlement to score. He has no right to win. He succeeds only by aggressively going after his goal. So when you see the tailback launch his body through the air like a missile trying to bowl over the last defender after skillfully dancing his way between the other two, do not think assertive; think Walter Payton—aggressive.
But that is not the whole story on aggression. Another type of aggression is called reactive aggression, sometimes referred to as hostile aggression. Reactive aggression is behavior that has as its primary and sometimes solitary goal to do harm to someone. Usually, this action is in response to a perceived injustice, insult, or wrongdoing. This form of aggression is related to anger and is the behavior that gets athletes in trouble, both on and off the field. An example of reactive aggression may be the pitcher who is furious that the last time a certain batter came to the plate, he hit a 450-foot (140-meter) homer that cleared the bleachers. Still fuming, the pitcher aims his 95 mile-per-hour (150-kilometer-per-hour) fastball between the hitter's shoulder blades.
Violence
Reactive aggression, in its most extreme forms, is violence, but the definition is not reflexive. Not all violence comes from anger and reactive aggression. Violence has, at its root, harm to another as its planned result.
Predatory violence, for example, is behavior in which the hunter seeks the hunted. In the animal world, the stealthy lion waits patiently in the brush for its prey to wander close enough to be ambushed. In the world of serial killers who hunt their victims, predators often do not have an increase in heart rate or sympathetic nervous system activity that usually accompanies anger. Anger is not related to this activity and in fact would interfere with the ability to hunt.
Terry and Jackson (1985) clarified sport violence as harm-inducing behavior outside the rules of sport, bearing no direct relationship to the competitive goals of sport. This definition nicely carved out a type of violence different from society's violence.
In an attempt to explain sport violence, I developed the Abrams model of sports violence (figure 1.1) that reflects the seeming overlap between aggression and violence. Understanding that injury can be part of the game, we can differentiate violence in the same way that we differentiate aggression. Incidental violence is violence that does not have harming another as its sole goal; it is directed toward sport goals. In contrast, reactive or hostile violence has the specific goal of causing harm to someone else.
Both represent behaviors that may go beyond the rules of the sport, but incidental violence is an extension of acceptable behavior. Checking in hockey provides a useful example. The line that differentiates checking from cross-checking or boarding, both of which are penalties, is often blurry. Overzealous players can certainly have their behavior spill over to being illegal. This behavior is different from reactive violence, in which the behavior is retaliatory. This kind of behavior can also be broken down into two categories. The first is the spontaneous response. There are some players who pride themselves on their ability to get inside their opponents' heads and will deliberately provoke them to take them off their game. New York Rangers forward Sean Avery, often described as an agitator, is particularly proficient at this. So, the player provokes the other repeatedly, perhaps by checking them with their stick. Finally, the provoking player checks the first player one too many times, and the player turns and swings the stick at the opponent's head. The response, although extreme, was not planned. This is spontaneous reactive aggression and is directly related to anger. Anger management programs specifically target reducing this type of behavior. More immediately though, the league or organization must penalize, fine, or suspend players engaging in such behavior as it can very easily cause serious injury.
Using psychological inventories to assess anger
Learn about different types of inventory methods and whether or not they work.
Using Psychological Inventories
The hallmark of psychology research is the self-report inventory. Many inventories were developed with the hope of capturing an emotion in a questionnaire. These too present problems.
The first problem with anger inventories is that they tend to be high in what researchers call face validity. The validity of a test is the extent to which it measures what it is supposed to measure. Face validity is the extent to which a test, on the face of it, measures what it is supposed to. Subjects who take tests that are high in face validity can easily tell what the researcher is measuring. For an emotional state like anger, which many people recognize has a negative connotation; subjects can provide answers that depict themselves in a favorable light. The test is easily faked. For that matter, if a subject wants the researcher to draw a particular conclusion, he or she can make the test show those results. Subjects respond in the ways that they do on such tests for many reasons. Those with an acquiescence bias will give the answer that they believe the researcher wants. Some want to paint themselves in a positive light. Some really do not pay attention to how they feel, and their self-report may not be based on reality. Some people lie. This may surprise you, but some people who lie do not have a specific reason to do so. A common false assumption is that people lie only if they have a good reason to do so, if they have something to gain. But, people lie for the fun of it, for the excitement of it, because they enjoy deceiving people, or for no reason at all. And the problem is that on these tests, it is hard to tell when someone is lying if the person lies consistently throughout the answers.
The second problem with anger scales is that a one-to-one correlation does not exist between measures on self-report inventories and behavior. Does every person who scores high on anger scales get in fights? No. One might even hypothesize that athletes who scores high on a self-report measure are less likely to act out because they have some awareness of their anger. Moreover, many of these scales were originally developed to measure pathology. Suppose that a student scored higher than everyone else in the class but her or his score did not reach the threshold of where anger is considered a problem. Can we say that this student is angrier than the other students? Maybe, but what does it mean? Not much.
The last problem with self-report measures is that even the ones that measure anger in state (being in an angry state right now) and trait (pervasive pattern of anger) dimensions, if not given when respondents are angry, may not reflect the true intensity of their emotions.
Nonetheless, self-report questionnaires are probably the best standardized tools that we have. Although several are available, I am going to focus on two that seem to be the most commonly used in the sport and clinical psychology literatures.
Profile of Moods States (POMS)
Originally developed in 1971 by McNair, Lorr, and Droppleman, the Profile of Mood States (POMS) has been cited in approximately 300 articles in the sport and exercise psychology literature. The test is a self-report measure in which subjects report on a Likert scale to what degree they experience the word describing an emotional state. The 65 words or phrases load into six mood states: tension, depression, anger, vigor, fatigue, and confusion. These six states can then be charted and their relative elevations noted.
Early research by William Morgan in the 1970s yielded the “iceberg profile” of elite athletes. While consulting with the United States Olympic Committee, Morgan found that successful elite athletes could be differentiated from unsuccessful candidates by this profile. Successful athletes had an elevation in vigor but much lower values for all the other mood states. This model has come under greater scrutiny over time, most notably in a meta-analysis of the articles that studied the iceberg profile (Rowley et al., 1995). Although that study found the iceberg profile to be a weak predictor of athletic success, the Profile of Mood States is still widely used and is currently found in approximately 1,500 published articles when you include studies outside of sport psychology as well.
The ease of administration paired with its established place in the sport psychology world makes the POMS one of the two instruments of choice in measuring anger in sport.
State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2)
The State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2), developed by psychologist Charles Spielberger, is the gold standard for anger assessment. STAXI-2 is a self-report inventory that measures anger in multiple dimensions. By responding to 57 items on a four-point scale (with 1 equating to “not at all” or “almost never” and 4 equating to “very much so” or “almost always”) assessment of the subjects' anger includes “either the intensity of their angry feelings at a particular time or how frequently anger is experienced, expressed, suppressed or controlled.” (Spielberger, STAXI-2 Manual, p. 4) The inventory is simple to administer, requiring only about 15 minutes, is normed for adolescents and adults, and is written at a sixth-grade reading level. Although it has not been normed specifically on athletes, its utility makes it ripe for such an extension. Finally, the inventory can be administered individually or in group settings.
The STAXI-2 measures anger along seven major scales and five subscales:
1. State Anger (S-Ang)—the intensity of and extent to which a person feels like expressing anger at a particular time.
a. Feeling Angry (S-Ang/F)—the intensity of the anger that the person is currently experiencing.
b. Feel Like Expressing Anger Verbally (S-Ang/V)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger verbally.
c. Feel Like Expressing Physically (S-Ang/P)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger physically.
2. Trait Anger (T-Ang)—how often angry feelings are experienced over time.
a. Angry Temperament (T-Ang/T)—measures the disposition to experience anger without specific provocation.
b. Angry Reaction (T-Ang/R)—the frequency that angry feelings are experienced in situations that involved frustration or negative evaluations.
3. Anger Expression-Out (AX-O)—how often anger is expressed in verbally or physically aggressive behavior.
4. Anger Expression-In (AX-I)—how often anger is experienced but not expressed.
5. Anger Control-Out (AC-O)—how often the person controls the outward expression of anger.
6. Anger Control-In (AC-I)—how often a person attempts to calm down to control angry feelings.
7. Anger Expression Index (AX Index)—a general index of anger expression.
As can be seen, the STAXI-2 does not just measure anger along different dimensions; it also taps the different methods that subjects report using to manage their anger. In my opinion, it is the most useful anger assessment tool available because it not only describes the person's anger but also gives the sport psychologist the starting point of knowing how the person assesses his or her own anger management tendencies.
Considering the lack of study that anger, aggression, and violence have received in sport psychology as a whole, it is not surprising that few sport-specific anger measures are available. The Bredemeier Athletic Aggression Inventory (BAAGI) (Bredemeier, 1975) deserves some attention because it measures instrumental aggression as well as reactive aggression. Following the theme that instrumental aggression is what we want to reinforce and reactive aggression is related to anger and needs to be curbed, this instrument may prove to have significant utility in future anger management studies of athletes.
One of the newer instruments to be introduced is the Competitive Aggressiveness and Anger Scale (CAAS; Maxwell & Moores, 2007) developed by Jon Maxwell and his colleagues in Hong Kong. Initial findings suggest that the CAAS is a valid scale for the measurement of aggressive tendencies (aggressiveness) and anger in sport. Because it attempts to overcome the shortcomings of other instruments, it has promise.
Developing anger management programs for athletes
The program uses guidelines to identify and manage anger.
The culmination of the previous chapters leads us to the “How To” of anger management. As should be clear by now, getting angry in and of itself, is not a problem. It is the high levels of anger that lead to reactive aggression. The program that is outlined below provides guidelines on how to recognize one's emotion levels and control them. This is done by becoming aware of one's body, how it changes when one is very angry, and different methods to both calm down when very angry as well as ways to avoid getting so angry in the first place. These techniques are truly cognitive and behavioral skills.
Prescreening for Anger Management Participation
Certain groups of people should be evaluated before they are enrolled in an anger management program. When I say evaluated, I do not mean unilaterally ruled out, but prescreened. Certain kinds of people are more likely to benefit than others are from this type of work, and determining who they are is important before beginning any anger management work.
The first question should always be this: Why are you here? If the person is self-referred and motivated—great! If the person shows up because someone said that he or she had to be there—beware! Mandated therapies are notoriously difficult, particularly when people are getting help for behavioral patterns that may be ego syntonic (they like acting that way). People who are doing this work are more likely to benefit from it if they are there because they chose to be there. I am not opposed to discussing with clients the benefits that they can get from anger management training, which certainly includes satisfying the mandate of whoever made the referral. Ultimately, success or failure will come from the client, not from the leader, so the person has the choice of how to proceed. Often, when the issue is posed that way, the client will concede and stay, at least to check it out. If you demand that they stay and participate, you may be wasting each other's time. Sometimes, people do better by delaying their participation until they are ready to do the work.
The second question is this: Who is the client? As in all sport psychology interventions, this question is critical. The issue is about more than knowing who is going to sign the check. The more important issues involve who is expecting results and how they are going to know about them. Sorting this out ahead of time is necessary to avoid confidentiality concerns and ethical conflicts as well to create a safe therapeutic space for the work to be done.
The last area of prescreening, which may include pretest questionnaires or other psychological testing in rare cases, is whether the likely problem for the individual is a skills deficit or severe psychopathology or even psychopathy. Refer to chapter 3 for instruments that may help make this determination.
When I receive an anger management referral, whether clinical or sport related, I ask for information about a recent medical examination and any counseling history. The screening should ask direct questions about past or current pathology, including substance abuse, to ascertain whether the client would be best served in a more controlled arena, such as in individual sessions where clinical problems can be addressed along with the anger issues. If you are not psychologically trained, you should refer the client to someone with the proper background before you start down this path. It could quickly go to places that you never expected.
Individual Versus Group
As Bruce Hale and I explained in our chapter for Shane Murphy's Sport Psych Handbook, both individual and group interventions have pluses and minuses. These attributes should be considered when deciding how to implement anger management skills.
Individual counseling sessions allow greater exploration of incidents and issues that may be embarrassing if addressed in front of others. Furthermore, if a hidden psychopathology may present, especially a trauma-related issue, a group setting could be not only humiliating but also damaging. In addition, current teammates may soon be on opposing teams. Sharing thoughts and feelings may leave a person feeling vulnerable. Exploring those thoughts and feelings one-on-one in a safe environment may promote greater honesty; the lack thereof is a considerable obstacle to progress.
Group interventions offer the opportunity for a group of athletes to learn the skills together. This aspect may be particularly valuable when the intervention is for a whole team or parts thereof. Reinforcement can then occur outside the leader's office, and what is learned can be extended to new environments. In my experience, group sessions can have a significant team-building effect. Athletes learn more about how other athletes think. Through role playing, they can see how their peers react to situations that may also develop in other venues. This area would be another good topic for research. In research on these types of interventions, measures of team cohesion may provide some useful information. By learning each other's triggers, players can help their teammates regain composure and self-control in volatile situations rather than react in a destructive manner.
In no case, however, do I assign any athlete to be responsible for the behavior of another. I do believe that athletes influence each other and contribute to the culture in which decisions are made, but people must ultimately take responsibility for themselves. Collectively, the team takes responsibility for the team.
Finally, although role playing is an excellent way to teach the lessons that follow, and it tends to be more effective than a lecture-based format, the leader must strive to make the program exciting, interactive, and fun. People learn better when they are having fun.
Anger Management
Hey, how do you feel?
Good?
Fine?
OK?
Not bad?
No, how do you feel?
Several basic elements can hinder the effectiveness of anger management programs. The first is that most people do not know how to label their emotions. Any emotion management program must begin with teaching people how to recognize how they feel. Just as important is to recognize that the purpose is not truly to manage anger. The real purpose is to manage behavior associated with anger, or reactive aggression management. The place to start is with emotion labeling because as arousal increases, controlling emotions and related behavior becomes increasingly difficult.
Emotion Labeling
In my opinion, the deficit in emotional labeling has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. The cause may be our susceptibility to the more-is-better approach: “If one is good, then give me a thousand.” We have great difficulty identifying how we feel and how much we feel. After all, emotions have their own experience, which varies slightly from person to person, but they can also be experienced at different intensities, frequencies, and durations.
Nothing about any emotion is inherently good or bad. The judgment that we place on them is the single greatest obstacle to managing them. To expand, parents often tell their children that being angry is not good. Men are socialized as boys to hide their emotions, especially their fears and sadness, although they may be simultaneously confused by the intense football coach who encourages their anger and aggression. The 12-year-old Pop Warner football player who cries may be called a sissy, a girl—as if being a girl is a bad thing—or worse. I will focus more on communication between coaches and athletes later, but at the onset, we must divorce ourselves from the idea that having a particular emotion is good or bad. Making that sort of judgment is complete nonsense.
The way to go about teaching athletes to label their emotions is twofold. The easier way to start is to teach them how their bodies react during emotional changes. They have their bodies with them all the time, they tend to pay close attention to their bodies (in my experience, the only group of clients who pay more attention to how their bodies feel are substance abusers), and they can gain tangible results from controlling the physiological changes associated with emotion.
Ask your athletes to imagine for a moment that they are not young human athletes but instead cute fuzzy bunnies in the woods. (Expect some groaning from your young male athletes, but proceed anyway.) Set up this scenario. You are hopping along and out of nowhere, a giant grizzly bear pops out with its claws bared and saliva dripping from its fangs. It growls as it moves toward its next meal . . . you.
Are you scared?
You bet your butt! How do you know? Think about how your body feels. What must you do to survive? You need either to run or to get ready to fight. In either case, your body needs to prepare for action. The autonomic nervous system is the automatic, involuntary part of the nervous system. It has two parts. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the increase in the following functions, and the parasympathetic nervous system controls the decrease. A loose analogy would be that the sympathetic nervous system is the on switch and the parasympathetic nervous system is the off switch. It is not quite that simple because some bodily functions do not abide by those rules, but in a fight-or-flight situation—in which you must either run or fight to survive—the sympathetic nervous system kicks in full force.
Learn the difference between anger, aggression, and violence
Anger, aggression, and violence can surface while participating in sports and affect how the game is played.
A New Vernacular
I believe that the definitions used in the sport psychology field regarding anger and violence require streamlining. As we go through relevant terminology and definitions that I think should be standardized (if for no other reason than to have pragmatic language that people can agree on), I will explain why I have made refinements to previously used terms.
Anger
Anger is a normal emotion. Anger is neither good nor bad, and no judgment need be attached to it. Some people believe that a problem arises if a person becomes angry. This idea is not true. To pass judgment on anger and condemn those who admit to becoming angry is the equivalent of robbing people of their humanness. Disallowing oneself from any part of the human experience weakens the experience in its totality. Sadness gives a reference point that makes happiness more appreciated. Tension can be better understood when compared with relaxation. It is about time we stopped making value judgments about anger. No one has ever gotten in trouble for becoming angry. You could be furious right now, but no one would know it unless you demonstrated some behavior associated with the anger. The belief that anger is bad is so strongly engrained that people will sometimes deny its existence even when it is spilling out all over the place. We have all heard someone with a red face expel incendiary words accompanied by saliva and then follow up by saying, “I am not angry!” The bad rap that anger has received has made it even more resistant to examination.
Truth be told, anger can be harnessed and used as fuel to assist in performance. Can it interfere with performance? You bet! Does it have to? Absolutely not. I have helped athletes compete harder with greater intensity for longer periods, motivated by their anger. The issue is not a matter of eliminating anger; it is a matter of keeping it at a level where it assists, not detracts from, performance.
Studies have shown that as anger increases, cognitive processing speed goes down, fine motor coordination and sensitivity to pain decrease, and muscle strength often increases. So for some athletes doing some tasks, anger can be helpful. For example, the defensive lineman who must make his way past a blocker to make a tackle might benefit from having some level of anger. For other tasks, anger would be a hindrance. The quarterback who needs to read the defense before deciding which receiver to throw to would likely perform better if he was not angry. In fact, some research supports this thesis. Players at football positions that require a lot of decision making tend to demonstrate lower levels of anger than players at positions that do not.
Therefore, when we talk about anger management for peak performance in sport, we are not always talking about making athletes polite and calm. Rather, we are referring to their ability to self-regulate their emotions to what their tasks require.
Aggression
What does it mean to be aggressive? Definitions that have permeated sport psychology for decades have stated that aggression has harm to another as a goal. It is no wonder that people frown on aggression in sport; it means that someone has to get hurt. This statement is not true. The adverb aggressively describes the method by which people go after their goals. It refers to the tenacity, the hunger, and the determination that people embody when striving for accomplishments. I checked: The women who succeeded on Wall Street climbed the corporate ladder aggressively. Success in life is not just handed to people. They have to want it. They have to go get it themselves. At the heart of Nike's “Just Do It” campaign is the idea of not waiting for it to come to you. Instead, you go from being passive to active and doing it yourself. Aggression is a necessary requirement for success in sport and in life in general.
Aggressive behavior can be broken down into various categories. The delineation that makes the most sense is that between instrumental aggression and reactive aggression.
Instrumental aggression is goal-directed aggression in which harm to another is not the primary goal, although it can be a secondary result of the action. In sport, an example would be the basketball player who slashes to the basket, leaps over a defender, and accidentally catches another defender with an elbow on the way up to scoring two points with a resounding dunk. The goal was to put the ball in the hole, not to harm an opponent. People who participate in sport know that injury is always a possibility. Accidental injuries happen. No blame should be assigned, and nothing in the rules of the game bans these incidents. Instrumental aggression is the hallmark for success in life and in sport and should be encouraged.
Some authors have described instrumental aggression as assertiveness. I believe that in making this distinction, psychologists are trying to soften things up in defense of the position that aggression is bad. Let us examine this for a moment. To be assertive is to stand up for one's rights. In fact, in the psychotherapy world, assertiveness training is used for people who have self-esteem problems. We teach them communication skills (we will revisit this topic later in the book) that will help them effectively and appropriately have their needs met.
To illustrate how assertiveness is not the same as instrumental aggression, consider the following: The tailback is 10 yards out from the goal line. Three defenders block the path between him and six points. Will he assertively communicate to his opponents, “Excuse me, gentlemen, would it be OK if you just acquiesced and allowed me to run past you? After all, it is my right to score this touchdown, you know”? Of course not! The tailback has no entitlement to score. He has no right to win. He succeeds only by aggressively going after his goal. So when you see the tailback launch his body through the air like a missile trying to bowl over the last defender after skillfully dancing his way between the other two, do not think assertive; think Walter Payton—aggressive.
But that is not the whole story on aggression. Another type of aggression is called reactive aggression, sometimes referred to as hostile aggression. Reactive aggression is behavior that has as its primary and sometimes solitary goal to do harm to someone. Usually, this action is in response to a perceived injustice, insult, or wrongdoing. This form of aggression is related to anger and is the behavior that gets athletes in trouble, both on and off the field. An example of reactive aggression may be the pitcher who is furious that the last time a certain batter came to the plate, he hit a 450-foot (140-meter) homer that cleared the bleachers. Still fuming, the pitcher aims his 95 mile-per-hour (150-kilometer-per-hour) fastball between the hitter's shoulder blades.
Violence
Reactive aggression, in its most extreme forms, is violence, but the definition is not reflexive. Not all violence comes from anger and reactive aggression. Violence has, at its root, harm to another as its planned result.
Predatory violence, for example, is behavior in which the hunter seeks the hunted. In the animal world, the stealthy lion waits patiently in the brush for its prey to wander close enough to be ambushed. In the world of serial killers who hunt their victims, predators often do not have an increase in heart rate or sympathetic nervous system activity that usually accompanies anger. Anger is not related to this activity and in fact would interfere with the ability to hunt.
Terry and Jackson (1985) clarified sport violence as harm-inducing behavior outside the rules of sport, bearing no direct relationship to the competitive goals of sport. This definition nicely carved out a type of violence different from society's violence.
In an attempt to explain sport violence, I developed the Abrams model of sports violence (figure 1.1) that reflects the seeming overlap between aggression and violence. Understanding that injury can be part of the game, we can differentiate violence in the same way that we differentiate aggression. Incidental violence is violence that does not have harming another as its sole goal; it is directed toward sport goals. In contrast, reactive or hostile violence has the specific goal of causing harm to someone else.
Both represent behaviors that may go beyond the rules of the sport, but incidental violence is an extension of acceptable behavior. Checking in hockey provides a useful example. The line that differentiates checking from cross-checking or boarding, both of which are penalties, is often blurry. Overzealous players can certainly have their behavior spill over to being illegal. This behavior is different from reactive violence, in which the behavior is retaliatory. This kind of behavior can also be broken down into two categories. The first is the spontaneous response. There are some players who pride themselves on their ability to get inside their opponents' heads and will deliberately provoke them to take them off their game. New York Rangers forward Sean Avery, often described as an agitator, is particularly proficient at this. So, the player provokes the other repeatedly, perhaps by checking them with their stick. Finally, the provoking player checks the first player one too many times, and the player turns and swings the stick at the opponent's head. The response, although extreme, was not planned. This is spontaneous reactive aggression and is directly related to anger. Anger management programs specifically target reducing this type of behavior. More immediately though, the league or organization must penalize, fine, or suspend players engaging in such behavior as it can very easily cause serious injury.
Using psychological inventories to assess anger
Learn about different types of inventory methods and whether or not they work.
Using Psychological Inventories
The hallmark of psychology research is the self-report inventory. Many inventories were developed with the hope of capturing an emotion in a questionnaire. These too present problems.
The first problem with anger inventories is that they tend to be high in what researchers call face validity. The validity of a test is the extent to which it measures what it is supposed to measure. Face validity is the extent to which a test, on the face of it, measures what it is supposed to. Subjects who take tests that are high in face validity can easily tell what the researcher is measuring. For an emotional state like anger, which many people recognize has a negative connotation; subjects can provide answers that depict themselves in a favorable light. The test is easily faked. For that matter, if a subject wants the researcher to draw a particular conclusion, he or she can make the test show those results. Subjects respond in the ways that they do on such tests for many reasons. Those with an acquiescence bias will give the answer that they believe the researcher wants. Some want to paint themselves in a positive light. Some really do not pay attention to how they feel, and their self-report may not be based on reality. Some people lie. This may surprise you, but some people who lie do not have a specific reason to do so. A common false assumption is that people lie only if they have a good reason to do so, if they have something to gain. But, people lie for the fun of it, for the excitement of it, because they enjoy deceiving people, or for no reason at all. And the problem is that on these tests, it is hard to tell when someone is lying if the person lies consistently throughout the answers.
The second problem with anger scales is that a one-to-one correlation does not exist between measures on self-report inventories and behavior. Does every person who scores high on anger scales get in fights? No. One might even hypothesize that athletes who scores high on a self-report measure are less likely to act out because they have some awareness of their anger. Moreover, many of these scales were originally developed to measure pathology. Suppose that a student scored higher than everyone else in the class but her or his score did not reach the threshold of where anger is considered a problem. Can we say that this student is angrier than the other students? Maybe, but what does it mean? Not much.
The last problem with self-report measures is that even the ones that measure anger in state (being in an angry state right now) and trait (pervasive pattern of anger) dimensions, if not given when respondents are angry, may not reflect the true intensity of their emotions.
Nonetheless, self-report questionnaires are probably the best standardized tools that we have. Although several are available, I am going to focus on two that seem to be the most commonly used in the sport and clinical psychology literatures.
Profile of Moods States (POMS)
Originally developed in 1971 by McNair, Lorr, and Droppleman, the Profile of Mood States (POMS) has been cited in approximately 300 articles in the sport and exercise psychology literature. The test is a self-report measure in which subjects report on a Likert scale to what degree they experience the word describing an emotional state. The 65 words or phrases load into six mood states: tension, depression, anger, vigor, fatigue, and confusion. These six states can then be charted and their relative elevations noted.
Early research by William Morgan in the 1970s yielded the “iceberg profile” of elite athletes. While consulting with the United States Olympic Committee, Morgan found that successful elite athletes could be differentiated from unsuccessful candidates by this profile. Successful athletes had an elevation in vigor but much lower values for all the other mood states. This model has come under greater scrutiny over time, most notably in a meta-analysis of the articles that studied the iceberg profile (Rowley et al., 1995). Although that study found the iceberg profile to be a weak predictor of athletic success, the Profile of Mood States is still widely used and is currently found in approximately 1,500 published articles when you include studies outside of sport psychology as well.
The ease of administration paired with its established place in the sport psychology world makes the POMS one of the two instruments of choice in measuring anger in sport.
State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2)
The State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2), developed by psychologist Charles Spielberger, is the gold standard for anger assessment. STAXI-2 is a self-report inventory that measures anger in multiple dimensions. By responding to 57 items on a four-point scale (with 1 equating to “not at all” or “almost never” and 4 equating to “very much so” or “almost always”) assessment of the subjects' anger includes “either the intensity of their angry feelings at a particular time or how frequently anger is experienced, expressed, suppressed or controlled.” (Spielberger, STAXI-2 Manual, p. 4) The inventory is simple to administer, requiring only about 15 minutes, is normed for adolescents and adults, and is written at a sixth-grade reading level. Although it has not been normed specifically on athletes, its utility makes it ripe for such an extension. Finally, the inventory can be administered individually or in group settings.
The STAXI-2 measures anger along seven major scales and five subscales:
1. State Anger (S-Ang)—the intensity of and extent to which a person feels like expressing anger at a particular time.
a. Feeling Angry (S-Ang/F)—the intensity of the anger that the person is currently experiencing.
b. Feel Like Expressing Anger Verbally (S-Ang/V)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger verbally.
c. Feel Like Expressing Physically (S-Ang/P)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger physically.
2. Trait Anger (T-Ang)—how often angry feelings are experienced over time.
a. Angry Temperament (T-Ang/T)—measures the disposition to experience anger without specific provocation.
b. Angry Reaction (T-Ang/R)—the frequency that angry feelings are experienced in situations that involved frustration or negative evaluations.
3. Anger Expression-Out (AX-O)—how often anger is expressed in verbally or physically aggressive behavior.
4. Anger Expression-In (AX-I)—how often anger is experienced but not expressed.
5. Anger Control-Out (AC-O)—how often the person controls the outward expression of anger.
6. Anger Control-In (AC-I)—how often a person attempts to calm down to control angry feelings.
7. Anger Expression Index (AX Index)—a general index of anger expression.
As can be seen, the STAXI-2 does not just measure anger along different dimensions; it also taps the different methods that subjects report using to manage their anger. In my opinion, it is the most useful anger assessment tool available because it not only describes the person's anger but also gives the sport psychologist the starting point of knowing how the person assesses his or her own anger management tendencies.
Considering the lack of study that anger, aggression, and violence have received in sport psychology as a whole, it is not surprising that few sport-specific anger measures are available. The Bredemeier Athletic Aggression Inventory (BAAGI) (Bredemeier, 1975) deserves some attention because it measures instrumental aggression as well as reactive aggression. Following the theme that instrumental aggression is what we want to reinforce and reactive aggression is related to anger and needs to be curbed, this instrument may prove to have significant utility in future anger management studies of athletes.
One of the newer instruments to be introduced is the Competitive Aggressiveness and Anger Scale (CAAS; Maxwell & Moores, 2007) developed by Jon Maxwell and his colleagues in Hong Kong. Initial findings suggest that the CAAS is a valid scale for the measurement of aggressive tendencies (aggressiveness) and anger in sport. Because it attempts to overcome the shortcomings of other instruments, it has promise.
Developing anger management programs for athletes
The program uses guidelines to identify and manage anger.
The culmination of the previous chapters leads us to the “How To” of anger management. As should be clear by now, getting angry in and of itself, is not a problem. It is the high levels of anger that lead to reactive aggression. The program that is outlined below provides guidelines on how to recognize one's emotion levels and control them. This is done by becoming aware of one's body, how it changes when one is very angry, and different methods to both calm down when very angry as well as ways to avoid getting so angry in the first place. These techniques are truly cognitive and behavioral skills.
Prescreening for Anger Management Participation
Certain groups of people should be evaluated before they are enrolled in an anger management program. When I say evaluated, I do not mean unilaterally ruled out, but prescreened. Certain kinds of people are more likely to benefit than others are from this type of work, and determining who they are is important before beginning any anger management work.
The first question should always be this: Why are you here? If the person is self-referred and motivated—great! If the person shows up because someone said that he or she had to be there—beware! Mandated therapies are notoriously difficult, particularly when people are getting help for behavioral patterns that may be ego syntonic (they like acting that way). People who are doing this work are more likely to benefit from it if they are there because they chose to be there. I am not opposed to discussing with clients the benefits that they can get from anger management training, which certainly includes satisfying the mandate of whoever made the referral. Ultimately, success or failure will come from the client, not from the leader, so the person has the choice of how to proceed. Often, when the issue is posed that way, the client will concede and stay, at least to check it out. If you demand that they stay and participate, you may be wasting each other's time. Sometimes, people do better by delaying their participation until they are ready to do the work.
The second question is this: Who is the client? As in all sport psychology interventions, this question is critical. The issue is about more than knowing who is going to sign the check. The more important issues involve who is expecting results and how they are going to know about them. Sorting this out ahead of time is necessary to avoid confidentiality concerns and ethical conflicts as well to create a safe therapeutic space for the work to be done.
The last area of prescreening, which may include pretest questionnaires or other psychological testing in rare cases, is whether the likely problem for the individual is a skills deficit or severe psychopathology or even psychopathy. Refer to chapter 3 for instruments that may help make this determination.
When I receive an anger management referral, whether clinical or sport related, I ask for information about a recent medical examination and any counseling history. The screening should ask direct questions about past or current pathology, including substance abuse, to ascertain whether the client would be best served in a more controlled arena, such as in individual sessions where clinical problems can be addressed along with the anger issues. If you are not psychologically trained, you should refer the client to someone with the proper background before you start down this path. It could quickly go to places that you never expected.
Individual Versus Group
As Bruce Hale and I explained in our chapter for Shane Murphy's Sport Psych Handbook, both individual and group interventions have pluses and minuses. These attributes should be considered when deciding how to implement anger management skills.
Individual counseling sessions allow greater exploration of incidents and issues that may be embarrassing if addressed in front of others. Furthermore, if a hidden psychopathology may present, especially a trauma-related issue, a group setting could be not only humiliating but also damaging. In addition, current teammates may soon be on opposing teams. Sharing thoughts and feelings may leave a person feeling vulnerable. Exploring those thoughts and feelings one-on-one in a safe environment may promote greater honesty; the lack thereof is a considerable obstacle to progress.
Group interventions offer the opportunity for a group of athletes to learn the skills together. This aspect may be particularly valuable when the intervention is for a whole team or parts thereof. Reinforcement can then occur outside the leader's office, and what is learned can be extended to new environments. In my experience, group sessions can have a significant team-building effect. Athletes learn more about how other athletes think. Through role playing, they can see how their peers react to situations that may also develop in other venues. This area would be another good topic for research. In research on these types of interventions, measures of team cohesion may provide some useful information. By learning each other's triggers, players can help their teammates regain composure and self-control in volatile situations rather than react in a destructive manner.
In no case, however, do I assign any athlete to be responsible for the behavior of another. I do believe that athletes influence each other and contribute to the culture in which decisions are made, but people must ultimately take responsibility for themselves. Collectively, the team takes responsibility for the team.
Finally, although role playing is an excellent way to teach the lessons that follow, and it tends to be more effective than a lecture-based format, the leader must strive to make the program exciting, interactive, and fun. People learn better when they are having fun.
Anger Management
Hey, how do you feel?
Good?
Fine?
OK?
Not bad?
No, how do you feel?
Several basic elements can hinder the effectiveness of anger management programs. The first is that most people do not know how to label their emotions. Any emotion management program must begin with teaching people how to recognize how they feel. Just as important is to recognize that the purpose is not truly to manage anger. The real purpose is to manage behavior associated with anger, or reactive aggression management. The place to start is with emotion labeling because as arousal increases, controlling emotions and related behavior becomes increasingly difficult.
Emotion Labeling
In my opinion, the deficit in emotional labeling has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. The cause may be our susceptibility to the more-is-better approach: “If one is good, then give me a thousand.” We have great difficulty identifying how we feel and how much we feel. After all, emotions have their own experience, which varies slightly from person to person, but they can also be experienced at different intensities, frequencies, and durations.
Nothing about any emotion is inherently good or bad. The judgment that we place on them is the single greatest obstacle to managing them. To expand, parents often tell their children that being angry is not good. Men are socialized as boys to hide their emotions, especially their fears and sadness, although they may be simultaneously confused by the intense football coach who encourages their anger and aggression. The 12-year-old Pop Warner football player who cries may be called a sissy, a girl—as if being a girl is a bad thing—or worse. I will focus more on communication between coaches and athletes later, but at the onset, we must divorce ourselves from the idea that having a particular emotion is good or bad. Making that sort of judgment is complete nonsense.
The way to go about teaching athletes to label their emotions is twofold. The easier way to start is to teach them how their bodies react during emotional changes. They have their bodies with them all the time, they tend to pay close attention to their bodies (in my experience, the only group of clients who pay more attention to how their bodies feel are substance abusers), and they can gain tangible results from controlling the physiological changes associated with emotion.
Ask your athletes to imagine for a moment that they are not young human athletes but instead cute fuzzy bunnies in the woods. (Expect some groaning from your young male athletes, but proceed anyway.) Set up this scenario. You are hopping along and out of nowhere, a giant grizzly bear pops out with its claws bared and saliva dripping from its fangs. It growls as it moves toward its next meal . . . you.
Are you scared?
You bet your butt! How do you know? Think about how your body feels. What must you do to survive? You need either to run or to get ready to fight. In either case, your body needs to prepare for action. The autonomic nervous system is the automatic, involuntary part of the nervous system. It has two parts. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the increase in the following functions, and the parasympathetic nervous system controls the decrease. A loose analogy would be that the sympathetic nervous system is the on switch and the parasympathetic nervous system is the off switch. It is not quite that simple because some bodily functions do not abide by those rules, but in a fight-or-flight situation—in which you must either run or fight to survive—the sympathetic nervous system kicks in full force.
Learn the difference between anger, aggression, and violence
Anger, aggression, and violence can surface while participating in sports and affect how the game is played.
A New Vernacular
I believe that the definitions used in the sport psychology field regarding anger and violence require streamlining. As we go through relevant terminology and definitions that I think should be standardized (if for no other reason than to have pragmatic language that people can agree on), I will explain why I have made refinements to previously used terms.
Anger
Anger is a normal emotion. Anger is neither good nor bad, and no judgment need be attached to it. Some people believe that a problem arises if a person becomes angry. This idea is not true. To pass judgment on anger and condemn those who admit to becoming angry is the equivalent of robbing people of their humanness. Disallowing oneself from any part of the human experience weakens the experience in its totality. Sadness gives a reference point that makes happiness more appreciated. Tension can be better understood when compared with relaxation. It is about time we stopped making value judgments about anger. No one has ever gotten in trouble for becoming angry. You could be furious right now, but no one would know it unless you demonstrated some behavior associated with the anger. The belief that anger is bad is so strongly engrained that people will sometimes deny its existence even when it is spilling out all over the place. We have all heard someone with a red face expel incendiary words accompanied by saliva and then follow up by saying, “I am not angry!” The bad rap that anger has received has made it even more resistant to examination.
Truth be told, anger can be harnessed and used as fuel to assist in performance. Can it interfere with performance? You bet! Does it have to? Absolutely not. I have helped athletes compete harder with greater intensity for longer periods, motivated by their anger. The issue is not a matter of eliminating anger; it is a matter of keeping it at a level where it assists, not detracts from, performance.
Studies have shown that as anger increases, cognitive processing speed goes down, fine motor coordination and sensitivity to pain decrease, and muscle strength often increases. So for some athletes doing some tasks, anger can be helpful. For example, the defensive lineman who must make his way past a blocker to make a tackle might benefit from having some level of anger. For other tasks, anger would be a hindrance. The quarterback who needs to read the defense before deciding which receiver to throw to would likely perform better if he was not angry. In fact, some research supports this thesis. Players at football positions that require a lot of decision making tend to demonstrate lower levels of anger than players at positions that do not.
Therefore, when we talk about anger management for peak performance in sport, we are not always talking about making athletes polite and calm. Rather, we are referring to their ability to self-regulate their emotions to what their tasks require.
Aggression
What does it mean to be aggressive? Definitions that have permeated sport psychology for decades have stated that aggression has harm to another as a goal. It is no wonder that people frown on aggression in sport; it means that someone has to get hurt. This statement is not true. The adverb aggressively describes the method by which people go after their goals. It refers to the tenacity, the hunger, and the determination that people embody when striving for accomplishments. I checked: The women who succeeded on Wall Street climbed the corporate ladder aggressively. Success in life is not just handed to people. They have to want it. They have to go get it themselves. At the heart of Nike's “Just Do It” campaign is the idea of not waiting for it to come to you. Instead, you go from being passive to active and doing it yourself. Aggression is a necessary requirement for success in sport and in life in general.
Aggressive behavior can be broken down into various categories. The delineation that makes the most sense is that between instrumental aggression and reactive aggression.
Instrumental aggression is goal-directed aggression in which harm to another is not the primary goal, although it can be a secondary result of the action. In sport, an example would be the basketball player who slashes to the basket, leaps over a defender, and accidentally catches another defender with an elbow on the way up to scoring two points with a resounding dunk. The goal was to put the ball in the hole, not to harm an opponent. People who participate in sport know that injury is always a possibility. Accidental injuries happen. No blame should be assigned, and nothing in the rules of the game bans these incidents. Instrumental aggression is the hallmark for success in life and in sport and should be encouraged.
Some authors have described instrumental aggression as assertiveness. I believe that in making this distinction, psychologists are trying to soften things up in defense of the position that aggression is bad. Let us examine this for a moment. To be assertive is to stand up for one's rights. In fact, in the psychotherapy world, assertiveness training is used for people who have self-esteem problems. We teach them communication skills (we will revisit this topic later in the book) that will help them effectively and appropriately have their needs met.
To illustrate how assertiveness is not the same as instrumental aggression, consider the following: The tailback is 10 yards out from the goal line. Three defenders block the path between him and six points. Will he assertively communicate to his opponents, “Excuse me, gentlemen, would it be OK if you just acquiesced and allowed me to run past you? After all, it is my right to score this touchdown, you know”? Of course not! The tailback has no entitlement to score. He has no right to win. He succeeds only by aggressively going after his goal. So when you see the tailback launch his body through the air like a missile trying to bowl over the last defender after skillfully dancing his way between the other two, do not think assertive; think Walter Payton—aggressive.
But that is not the whole story on aggression. Another type of aggression is called reactive aggression, sometimes referred to as hostile aggression. Reactive aggression is behavior that has as its primary and sometimes solitary goal to do harm to someone. Usually, this action is in response to a perceived injustice, insult, or wrongdoing. This form of aggression is related to anger and is the behavior that gets athletes in trouble, both on and off the field. An example of reactive aggression may be the pitcher who is furious that the last time a certain batter came to the plate, he hit a 450-foot (140-meter) homer that cleared the bleachers. Still fuming, the pitcher aims his 95 mile-per-hour (150-kilometer-per-hour) fastball between the hitter's shoulder blades.
Violence
Reactive aggression, in its most extreme forms, is violence, but the definition is not reflexive. Not all violence comes from anger and reactive aggression. Violence has, at its root, harm to another as its planned result.
Predatory violence, for example, is behavior in which the hunter seeks the hunted. In the animal world, the stealthy lion waits patiently in the brush for its prey to wander close enough to be ambushed. In the world of serial killers who hunt their victims, predators often do not have an increase in heart rate or sympathetic nervous system activity that usually accompanies anger. Anger is not related to this activity and in fact would interfere with the ability to hunt.
Terry and Jackson (1985) clarified sport violence as harm-inducing behavior outside the rules of sport, bearing no direct relationship to the competitive goals of sport. This definition nicely carved out a type of violence different from society's violence.
In an attempt to explain sport violence, I developed the Abrams model of sports violence (figure 1.1) that reflects the seeming overlap between aggression and violence. Understanding that injury can be part of the game, we can differentiate violence in the same way that we differentiate aggression. Incidental violence is violence that does not have harming another as its sole goal; it is directed toward sport goals. In contrast, reactive or hostile violence has the specific goal of causing harm to someone else.
Both represent behaviors that may go beyond the rules of the sport, but incidental violence is an extension of acceptable behavior. Checking in hockey provides a useful example. The line that differentiates checking from cross-checking or boarding, both of which are penalties, is often blurry. Overzealous players can certainly have their behavior spill over to being illegal. This behavior is different from reactive violence, in which the behavior is retaliatory. This kind of behavior can also be broken down into two categories. The first is the spontaneous response. There are some players who pride themselves on their ability to get inside their opponents' heads and will deliberately provoke them to take them off their game. New York Rangers forward Sean Avery, often described as an agitator, is particularly proficient at this. So, the player provokes the other repeatedly, perhaps by checking them with their stick. Finally, the provoking player checks the first player one too many times, and the player turns and swings the stick at the opponent's head. The response, although extreme, was not planned. This is spontaneous reactive aggression and is directly related to anger. Anger management programs specifically target reducing this type of behavior. More immediately though, the league or organization must penalize, fine, or suspend players engaging in such behavior as it can very easily cause serious injury.
Using psychological inventories to assess anger
Learn about different types of inventory methods and whether or not they work.
Using Psychological Inventories
The hallmark of psychology research is the self-report inventory. Many inventories were developed with the hope of capturing an emotion in a questionnaire. These too present problems.
The first problem with anger inventories is that they tend to be high in what researchers call face validity. The validity of a test is the extent to which it measures what it is supposed to measure. Face validity is the extent to which a test, on the face of it, measures what it is supposed to. Subjects who take tests that are high in face validity can easily tell what the researcher is measuring. For an emotional state like anger, which many people recognize has a negative connotation; subjects can provide answers that depict themselves in a favorable light. The test is easily faked. For that matter, if a subject wants the researcher to draw a particular conclusion, he or she can make the test show those results. Subjects respond in the ways that they do on such tests for many reasons. Those with an acquiescence bias will give the answer that they believe the researcher wants. Some want to paint themselves in a positive light. Some really do not pay attention to how they feel, and their self-report may not be based on reality. Some people lie. This may surprise you, but some people who lie do not have a specific reason to do so. A common false assumption is that people lie only if they have a good reason to do so, if they have something to gain. But, people lie for the fun of it, for the excitement of it, because they enjoy deceiving people, or for no reason at all. And the problem is that on these tests, it is hard to tell when someone is lying if the person lies consistently throughout the answers.
The second problem with anger scales is that a one-to-one correlation does not exist between measures on self-report inventories and behavior. Does every person who scores high on anger scales get in fights? No. One might even hypothesize that athletes who scores high on a self-report measure are less likely to act out because they have some awareness of their anger. Moreover, many of these scales were originally developed to measure pathology. Suppose that a student scored higher than everyone else in the class but her or his score did not reach the threshold of where anger is considered a problem. Can we say that this student is angrier than the other students? Maybe, but what does it mean? Not much.
The last problem with self-report measures is that even the ones that measure anger in state (being in an angry state right now) and trait (pervasive pattern of anger) dimensions, if not given when respondents are angry, may not reflect the true intensity of their emotions.
Nonetheless, self-report questionnaires are probably the best standardized tools that we have. Although several are available, I am going to focus on two that seem to be the most commonly used in the sport and clinical psychology literatures.
Profile of Moods States (POMS)
Originally developed in 1971 by McNair, Lorr, and Droppleman, the Profile of Mood States (POMS) has been cited in approximately 300 articles in the sport and exercise psychology literature. The test is a self-report measure in which subjects report on a Likert scale to what degree they experience the word describing an emotional state. The 65 words or phrases load into six mood states: tension, depression, anger, vigor, fatigue, and confusion. These six states can then be charted and their relative elevations noted.
Early research by William Morgan in the 1970s yielded the “iceberg profile” of elite athletes. While consulting with the United States Olympic Committee, Morgan found that successful elite athletes could be differentiated from unsuccessful candidates by this profile. Successful athletes had an elevation in vigor but much lower values for all the other mood states. This model has come under greater scrutiny over time, most notably in a meta-analysis of the articles that studied the iceberg profile (Rowley et al., 1995). Although that study found the iceberg profile to be a weak predictor of athletic success, the Profile of Mood States is still widely used and is currently found in approximately 1,500 published articles when you include studies outside of sport psychology as well.
The ease of administration paired with its established place in the sport psychology world makes the POMS one of the two instruments of choice in measuring anger in sport.
State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2)
The State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2), developed by psychologist Charles Spielberger, is the gold standard for anger assessment. STAXI-2 is a self-report inventory that measures anger in multiple dimensions. By responding to 57 items on a four-point scale (with 1 equating to “not at all” or “almost never” and 4 equating to “very much so” or “almost always”) assessment of the subjects' anger includes “either the intensity of their angry feelings at a particular time or how frequently anger is experienced, expressed, suppressed or controlled.” (Spielberger, STAXI-2 Manual, p. 4) The inventory is simple to administer, requiring only about 15 minutes, is normed for adolescents and adults, and is written at a sixth-grade reading level. Although it has not been normed specifically on athletes, its utility makes it ripe for such an extension. Finally, the inventory can be administered individually or in group settings.
The STAXI-2 measures anger along seven major scales and five subscales:
1. State Anger (S-Ang)—the intensity of and extent to which a person feels like expressing anger at a particular time.
a. Feeling Angry (S-Ang/F)—the intensity of the anger that the person is currently experiencing.
b. Feel Like Expressing Anger Verbally (S-Ang/V)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger verbally.
c. Feel Like Expressing Physically (S-Ang/P)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger physically.
2. Trait Anger (T-Ang)—how often angry feelings are experienced over time.
a. Angry Temperament (T-Ang/T)—measures the disposition to experience anger without specific provocation.
b. Angry Reaction (T-Ang/R)—the frequency that angry feelings are experienced in situations that involved frustration or negative evaluations.
3. Anger Expression-Out (AX-O)—how often anger is expressed in verbally or physically aggressive behavior.
4. Anger Expression-In (AX-I)—how often anger is experienced but not expressed.
5. Anger Control-Out (AC-O)—how often the person controls the outward expression of anger.
6. Anger Control-In (AC-I)—how often a person attempts to calm down to control angry feelings.
7. Anger Expression Index (AX Index)—a general index of anger expression.
As can be seen, the STAXI-2 does not just measure anger along different dimensions; it also taps the different methods that subjects report using to manage their anger. In my opinion, it is the most useful anger assessment tool available because it not only describes the person's anger but also gives the sport psychologist the starting point of knowing how the person assesses his or her own anger management tendencies.
Considering the lack of study that anger, aggression, and violence have received in sport psychology as a whole, it is not surprising that few sport-specific anger measures are available. The Bredemeier Athletic Aggression Inventory (BAAGI) (Bredemeier, 1975) deserves some attention because it measures instrumental aggression as well as reactive aggression. Following the theme that instrumental aggression is what we want to reinforce and reactive aggression is related to anger and needs to be curbed, this instrument may prove to have significant utility in future anger management studies of athletes.
One of the newer instruments to be introduced is the Competitive Aggressiveness and Anger Scale (CAAS; Maxwell & Moores, 2007) developed by Jon Maxwell and his colleagues in Hong Kong. Initial findings suggest that the CAAS is a valid scale for the measurement of aggressive tendencies (aggressiveness) and anger in sport. Because it attempts to overcome the shortcomings of other instruments, it has promise.
Developing anger management programs for athletes
The program uses guidelines to identify and manage anger.
The culmination of the previous chapters leads us to the “How To” of anger management. As should be clear by now, getting angry in and of itself, is not a problem. It is the high levels of anger that lead to reactive aggression. The program that is outlined below provides guidelines on how to recognize one's emotion levels and control them. This is done by becoming aware of one's body, how it changes when one is very angry, and different methods to both calm down when very angry as well as ways to avoid getting so angry in the first place. These techniques are truly cognitive and behavioral skills.
Prescreening for Anger Management Participation
Certain groups of people should be evaluated before they are enrolled in an anger management program. When I say evaluated, I do not mean unilaterally ruled out, but prescreened. Certain kinds of people are more likely to benefit than others are from this type of work, and determining who they are is important before beginning any anger management work.
The first question should always be this: Why are you here? If the person is self-referred and motivated—great! If the person shows up because someone said that he or she had to be there—beware! Mandated therapies are notoriously difficult, particularly when people are getting help for behavioral patterns that may be ego syntonic (they like acting that way). People who are doing this work are more likely to benefit from it if they are there because they chose to be there. I am not opposed to discussing with clients the benefits that they can get from anger management training, which certainly includes satisfying the mandate of whoever made the referral. Ultimately, success or failure will come from the client, not from the leader, so the person has the choice of how to proceed. Often, when the issue is posed that way, the client will concede and stay, at least to check it out. If you demand that they stay and participate, you may be wasting each other's time. Sometimes, people do better by delaying their participation until they are ready to do the work.
The second question is this: Who is the client? As in all sport psychology interventions, this question is critical. The issue is about more than knowing who is going to sign the check. The more important issues involve who is expecting results and how they are going to know about them. Sorting this out ahead of time is necessary to avoid confidentiality concerns and ethical conflicts as well to create a safe therapeutic space for the work to be done.
The last area of prescreening, which may include pretest questionnaires or other psychological testing in rare cases, is whether the likely problem for the individual is a skills deficit or severe psychopathology or even psychopathy. Refer to chapter 3 for instruments that may help make this determination.
When I receive an anger management referral, whether clinical or sport related, I ask for information about a recent medical examination and any counseling history. The screening should ask direct questions about past or current pathology, including substance abuse, to ascertain whether the client would be best served in a more controlled arena, such as in individual sessions where clinical problems can be addressed along with the anger issues. If you are not psychologically trained, you should refer the client to someone with the proper background before you start down this path. It could quickly go to places that you never expected.
Individual Versus Group
As Bruce Hale and I explained in our chapter for Shane Murphy's Sport Psych Handbook, both individual and group interventions have pluses and minuses. These attributes should be considered when deciding how to implement anger management skills.
Individual counseling sessions allow greater exploration of incidents and issues that may be embarrassing if addressed in front of others. Furthermore, if a hidden psychopathology may present, especially a trauma-related issue, a group setting could be not only humiliating but also damaging. In addition, current teammates may soon be on opposing teams. Sharing thoughts and feelings may leave a person feeling vulnerable. Exploring those thoughts and feelings one-on-one in a safe environment may promote greater honesty; the lack thereof is a considerable obstacle to progress.
Group interventions offer the opportunity for a group of athletes to learn the skills together. This aspect may be particularly valuable when the intervention is for a whole team or parts thereof. Reinforcement can then occur outside the leader's office, and what is learned can be extended to new environments. In my experience, group sessions can have a significant team-building effect. Athletes learn more about how other athletes think. Through role playing, they can see how their peers react to situations that may also develop in other venues. This area would be another good topic for research. In research on these types of interventions, measures of team cohesion may provide some useful information. By learning each other's triggers, players can help their teammates regain composure and self-control in volatile situations rather than react in a destructive manner.
In no case, however, do I assign any athlete to be responsible for the behavior of another. I do believe that athletes influence each other and contribute to the culture in which decisions are made, but people must ultimately take responsibility for themselves. Collectively, the team takes responsibility for the team.
Finally, although role playing is an excellent way to teach the lessons that follow, and it tends to be more effective than a lecture-based format, the leader must strive to make the program exciting, interactive, and fun. People learn better when they are having fun.
Anger Management
Hey, how do you feel?
Good?
Fine?
OK?
Not bad?
No, how do you feel?
Several basic elements can hinder the effectiveness of anger management programs. The first is that most people do not know how to label their emotions. Any emotion management program must begin with teaching people how to recognize how they feel. Just as important is to recognize that the purpose is not truly to manage anger. The real purpose is to manage behavior associated with anger, or reactive aggression management. The place to start is with emotion labeling because as arousal increases, controlling emotions and related behavior becomes increasingly difficult.
Emotion Labeling
In my opinion, the deficit in emotional labeling has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. The cause may be our susceptibility to the more-is-better approach: “If one is good, then give me a thousand.” We have great difficulty identifying how we feel and how much we feel. After all, emotions have their own experience, which varies slightly from person to person, but they can also be experienced at different intensities, frequencies, and durations.
Nothing about any emotion is inherently good or bad. The judgment that we place on them is the single greatest obstacle to managing them. To expand, parents often tell their children that being angry is not good. Men are socialized as boys to hide their emotions, especially their fears and sadness, although they may be simultaneously confused by the intense football coach who encourages their anger and aggression. The 12-year-old Pop Warner football player who cries may be called a sissy, a girl—as if being a girl is a bad thing—or worse. I will focus more on communication between coaches and athletes later, but at the onset, we must divorce ourselves from the idea that having a particular emotion is good or bad. Making that sort of judgment is complete nonsense.
The way to go about teaching athletes to label their emotions is twofold. The easier way to start is to teach them how their bodies react during emotional changes. They have their bodies with them all the time, they tend to pay close attention to their bodies (in my experience, the only group of clients who pay more attention to how their bodies feel are substance abusers), and they can gain tangible results from controlling the physiological changes associated with emotion.
Ask your athletes to imagine for a moment that they are not young human athletes but instead cute fuzzy bunnies in the woods. (Expect some groaning from your young male athletes, but proceed anyway.) Set up this scenario. You are hopping along and out of nowhere, a giant grizzly bear pops out with its claws bared and saliva dripping from its fangs. It growls as it moves toward its next meal . . . you.
Are you scared?
You bet your butt! How do you know? Think about how your body feels. What must you do to survive? You need either to run or to get ready to fight. In either case, your body needs to prepare for action. The autonomic nervous system is the automatic, involuntary part of the nervous system. It has two parts. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the increase in the following functions, and the parasympathetic nervous system controls the decrease. A loose analogy would be that the sympathetic nervous system is the on switch and the parasympathetic nervous system is the off switch. It is not quite that simple because some bodily functions do not abide by those rules, but in a fight-or-flight situation—in which you must either run or fight to survive—the sympathetic nervous system kicks in full force.
Learn the difference between anger, aggression, and violence
Anger, aggression, and violence can surface while participating in sports and affect how the game is played.
A New Vernacular
I believe that the definitions used in the sport psychology field regarding anger and violence require streamlining. As we go through relevant terminology and definitions that I think should be standardized (if for no other reason than to have pragmatic language that people can agree on), I will explain why I have made refinements to previously used terms.
Anger
Anger is a normal emotion. Anger is neither good nor bad, and no judgment need be attached to it. Some people believe that a problem arises if a person becomes angry. This idea is not true. To pass judgment on anger and condemn those who admit to becoming angry is the equivalent of robbing people of their humanness. Disallowing oneself from any part of the human experience weakens the experience in its totality. Sadness gives a reference point that makes happiness more appreciated. Tension can be better understood when compared with relaxation. It is about time we stopped making value judgments about anger. No one has ever gotten in trouble for becoming angry. You could be furious right now, but no one would know it unless you demonstrated some behavior associated with the anger. The belief that anger is bad is so strongly engrained that people will sometimes deny its existence even when it is spilling out all over the place. We have all heard someone with a red face expel incendiary words accompanied by saliva and then follow up by saying, “I am not angry!” The bad rap that anger has received has made it even more resistant to examination.
Truth be told, anger can be harnessed and used as fuel to assist in performance. Can it interfere with performance? You bet! Does it have to? Absolutely not. I have helped athletes compete harder with greater intensity for longer periods, motivated by their anger. The issue is not a matter of eliminating anger; it is a matter of keeping it at a level where it assists, not detracts from, performance.
Studies have shown that as anger increases, cognitive processing speed goes down, fine motor coordination and sensitivity to pain decrease, and muscle strength often increases. So for some athletes doing some tasks, anger can be helpful. For example, the defensive lineman who must make his way past a blocker to make a tackle might benefit from having some level of anger. For other tasks, anger would be a hindrance. The quarterback who needs to read the defense before deciding which receiver to throw to would likely perform better if he was not angry. In fact, some research supports this thesis. Players at football positions that require a lot of decision making tend to demonstrate lower levels of anger than players at positions that do not.
Therefore, when we talk about anger management for peak performance in sport, we are not always talking about making athletes polite and calm. Rather, we are referring to their ability to self-regulate their emotions to what their tasks require.
Aggression
What does it mean to be aggressive? Definitions that have permeated sport psychology for decades have stated that aggression has harm to another as a goal. It is no wonder that people frown on aggression in sport; it means that someone has to get hurt. This statement is not true. The adverb aggressively describes the method by which people go after their goals. It refers to the tenacity, the hunger, and the determination that people embody when striving for accomplishments. I checked: The women who succeeded on Wall Street climbed the corporate ladder aggressively. Success in life is not just handed to people. They have to want it. They have to go get it themselves. At the heart of Nike's “Just Do It” campaign is the idea of not waiting for it to come to you. Instead, you go from being passive to active and doing it yourself. Aggression is a necessary requirement for success in sport and in life in general.
Aggressive behavior can be broken down into various categories. The delineation that makes the most sense is that between instrumental aggression and reactive aggression.
Instrumental aggression is goal-directed aggression in which harm to another is not the primary goal, although it can be a secondary result of the action. In sport, an example would be the basketball player who slashes to the basket, leaps over a defender, and accidentally catches another defender with an elbow on the way up to scoring two points with a resounding dunk. The goal was to put the ball in the hole, not to harm an opponent. People who participate in sport know that injury is always a possibility. Accidental injuries happen. No blame should be assigned, and nothing in the rules of the game bans these incidents. Instrumental aggression is the hallmark for success in life and in sport and should be encouraged.
Some authors have described instrumental aggression as assertiveness. I believe that in making this distinction, psychologists are trying to soften things up in defense of the position that aggression is bad. Let us examine this for a moment. To be assertive is to stand up for one's rights. In fact, in the psychotherapy world, assertiveness training is used for people who have self-esteem problems. We teach them communication skills (we will revisit this topic later in the book) that will help them effectively and appropriately have their needs met.
To illustrate how assertiveness is not the same as instrumental aggression, consider the following: The tailback is 10 yards out from the goal line. Three defenders block the path between him and six points. Will he assertively communicate to his opponents, “Excuse me, gentlemen, would it be OK if you just acquiesced and allowed me to run past you? After all, it is my right to score this touchdown, you know”? Of course not! The tailback has no entitlement to score. He has no right to win. He succeeds only by aggressively going after his goal. So when you see the tailback launch his body through the air like a missile trying to bowl over the last defender after skillfully dancing his way between the other two, do not think assertive; think Walter Payton—aggressive.
But that is not the whole story on aggression. Another type of aggression is called reactive aggression, sometimes referred to as hostile aggression. Reactive aggression is behavior that has as its primary and sometimes solitary goal to do harm to someone. Usually, this action is in response to a perceived injustice, insult, or wrongdoing. This form of aggression is related to anger and is the behavior that gets athletes in trouble, both on and off the field. An example of reactive aggression may be the pitcher who is furious that the last time a certain batter came to the plate, he hit a 450-foot (140-meter) homer that cleared the bleachers. Still fuming, the pitcher aims his 95 mile-per-hour (150-kilometer-per-hour) fastball between the hitter's shoulder blades.
Violence
Reactive aggression, in its most extreme forms, is violence, but the definition is not reflexive. Not all violence comes from anger and reactive aggression. Violence has, at its root, harm to another as its planned result.
Predatory violence, for example, is behavior in which the hunter seeks the hunted. In the animal world, the stealthy lion waits patiently in the brush for its prey to wander close enough to be ambushed. In the world of serial killers who hunt their victims, predators often do not have an increase in heart rate or sympathetic nervous system activity that usually accompanies anger. Anger is not related to this activity and in fact would interfere with the ability to hunt.
Terry and Jackson (1985) clarified sport violence as harm-inducing behavior outside the rules of sport, bearing no direct relationship to the competitive goals of sport. This definition nicely carved out a type of violence different from society's violence.
In an attempt to explain sport violence, I developed the Abrams model of sports violence (figure 1.1) that reflects the seeming overlap between aggression and violence. Understanding that injury can be part of the game, we can differentiate violence in the same way that we differentiate aggression. Incidental violence is violence that does not have harming another as its sole goal; it is directed toward sport goals. In contrast, reactive or hostile violence has the specific goal of causing harm to someone else.
Both represent behaviors that may go beyond the rules of the sport, but incidental violence is an extension of acceptable behavior. Checking in hockey provides a useful example. The line that differentiates checking from cross-checking or boarding, both of which are penalties, is often blurry. Overzealous players can certainly have their behavior spill over to being illegal. This behavior is different from reactive violence, in which the behavior is retaliatory. This kind of behavior can also be broken down into two categories. The first is the spontaneous response. There are some players who pride themselves on their ability to get inside their opponents' heads and will deliberately provoke them to take them off their game. New York Rangers forward Sean Avery, often described as an agitator, is particularly proficient at this. So, the player provokes the other repeatedly, perhaps by checking them with their stick. Finally, the provoking player checks the first player one too many times, and the player turns and swings the stick at the opponent's head. The response, although extreme, was not planned. This is spontaneous reactive aggression and is directly related to anger. Anger management programs specifically target reducing this type of behavior. More immediately though, the league or organization must penalize, fine, or suspend players engaging in such behavior as it can very easily cause serious injury.
Using psychological inventories to assess anger
Learn about different types of inventory methods and whether or not they work.
Using Psychological Inventories
The hallmark of psychology research is the self-report inventory. Many inventories were developed with the hope of capturing an emotion in a questionnaire. These too present problems.
The first problem with anger inventories is that they tend to be high in what researchers call face validity. The validity of a test is the extent to which it measures what it is supposed to measure. Face validity is the extent to which a test, on the face of it, measures what it is supposed to. Subjects who take tests that are high in face validity can easily tell what the researcher is measuring. For an emotional state like anger, which many people recognize has a negative connotation; subjects can provide answers that depict themselves in a favorable light. The test is easily faked. For that matter, if a subject wants the researcher to draw a particular conclusion, he or she can make the test show those results. Subjects respond in the ways that they do on such tests for many reasons. Those with an acquiescence bias will give the answer that they believe the researcher wants. Some want to paint themselves in a positive light. Some really do not pay attention to how they feel, and their self-report may not be based on reality. Some people lie. This may surprise you, but some people who lie do not have a specific reason to do so. A common false assumption is that people lie only if they have a good reason to do so, if they have something to gain. But, people lie for the fun of it, for the excitement of it, because they enjoy deceiving people, or for no reason at all. And the problem is that on these tests, it is hard to tell when someone is lying if the person lies consistently throughout the answers.
The second problem with anger scales is that a one-to-one correlation does not exist between measures on self-report inventories and behavior. Does every person who scores high on anger scales get in fights? No. One might even hypothesize that athletes who scores high on a self-report measure are less likely to act out because they have some awareness of their anger. Moreover, many of these scales were originally developed to measure pathology. Suppose that a student scored higher than everyone else in the class but her or his score did not reach the threshold of where anger is considered a problem. Can we say that this student is angrier than the other students? Maybe, but what does it mean? Not much.
The last problem with self-report measures is that even the ones that measure anger in state (being in an angry state right now) and trait (pervasive pattern of anger) dimensions, if not given when respondents are angry, may not reflect the true intensity of their emotions.
Nonetheless, self-report questionnaires are probably the best standardized tools that we have. Although several are available, I am going to focus on two that seem to be the most commonly used in the sport and clinical psychology literatures.
Profile of Moods States (POMS)
Originally developed in 1971 by McNair, Lorr, and Droppleman, the Profile of Mood States (POMS) has been cited in approximately 300 articles in the sport and exercise psychology literature. The test is a self-report measure in which subjects report on a Likert scale to what degree they experience the word describing an emotional state. The 65 words or phrases load into six mood states: tension, depression, anger, vigor, fatigue, and confusion. These six states can then be charted and their relative elevations noted.
Early research by William Morgan in the 1970s yielded the “iceberg profile” of elite athletes. While consulting with the United States Olympic Committee, Morgan found that successful elite athletes could be differentiated from unsuccessful candidates by this profile. Successful athletes had an elevation in vigor but much lower values for all the other mood states. This model has come under greater scrutiny over time, most notably in a meta-analysis of the articles that studied the iceberg profile (Rowley et al., 1995). Although that study found the iceberg profile to be a weak predictor of athletic success, the Profile of Mood States is still widely used and is currently found in approximately 1,500 published articles when you include studies outside of sport psychology as well.
The ease of administration paired with its established place in the sport psychology world makes the POMS one of the two instruments of choice in measuring anger in sport.
State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2)
The State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2), developed by psychologist Charles Spielberger, is the gold standard for anger assessment. STAXI-2 is a self-report inventory that measures anger in multiple dimensions. By responding to 57 items on a four-point scale (with 1 equating to “not at all” or “almost never” and 4 equating to “very much so” or “almost always”) assessment of the subjects' anger includes “either the intensity of their angry feelings at a particular time or how frequently anger is experienced, expressed, suppressed or controlled.” (Spielberger, STAXI-2 Manual, p. 4) The inventory is simple to administer, requiring only about 15 minutes, is normed for adolescents and adults, and is written at a sixth-grade reading level. Although it has not been normed specifically on athletes, its utility makes it ripe for such an extension. Finally, the inventory can be administered individually or in group settings.
The STAXI-2 measures anger along seven major scales and five subscales:
1. State Anger (S-Ang)—the intensity of and extent to which a person feels like expressing anger at a particular time.
a. Feeling Angry (S-Ang/F)—the intensity of the anger that the person is currently experiencing.
b. Feel Like Expressing Anger Verbally (S-Ang/V)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger verbally.
c. Feel Like Expressing Physically (S-Ang/P)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger physically.
2. Trait Anger (T-Ang)—how often angry feelings are experienced over time.
a. Angry Temperament (T-Ang/T)—measures the disposition to experience anger without specific provocation.
b. Angry Reaction (T-Ang/R)—the frequency that angry feelings are experienced in situations that involved frustration or negative evaluations.
3. Anger Expression-Out (AX-O)—how often anger is expressed in verbally or physically aggressive behavior.
4. Anger Expression-In (AX-I)—how often anger is experienced but not expressed.
5. Anger Control-Out (AC-O)—how often the person controls the outward expression of anger.
6. Anger Control-In (AC-I)—how often a person attempts to calm down to control angry feelings.
7. Anger Expression Index (AX Index)—a general index of anger expression.
As can be seen, the STAXI-2 does not just measure anger along different dimensions; it also taps the different methods that subjects report using to manage their anger. In my opinion, it is the most useful anger assessment tool available because it not only describes the person's anger but also gives the sport psychologist the starting point of knowing how the person assesses his or her own anger management tendencies.
Considering the lack of study that anger, aggression, and violence have received in sport psychology as a whole, it is not surprising that few sport-specific anger measures are available. The Bredemeier Athletic Aggression Inventory (BAAGI) (Bredemeier, 1975) deserves some attention because it measures instrumental aggression as well as reactive aggression. Following the theme that instrumental aggression is what we want to reinforce and reactive aggression is related to anger and needs to be curbed, this instrument may prove to have significant utility in future anger management studies of athletes.
One of the newer instruments to be introduced is the Competitive Aggressiveness and Anger Scale (CAAS; Maxwell & Moores, 2007) developed by Jon Maxwell and his colleagues in Hong Kong. Initial findings suggest that the CAAS is a valid scale for the measurement of aggressive tendencies (aggressiveness) and anger in sport. Because it attempts to overcome the shortcomings of other instruments, it has promise.
Developing anger management programs for athletes
The program uses guidelines to identify and manage anger.
The culmination of the previous chapters leads us to the “How To” of anger management. As should be clear by now, getting angry in and of itself, is not a problem. It is the high levels of anger that lead to reactive aggression. The program that is outlined below provides guidelines on how to recognize one's emotion levels and control them. This is done by becoming aware of one's body, how it changes when one is very angry, and different methods to both calm down when very angry as well as ways to avoid getting so angry in the first place. These techniques are truly cognitive and behavioral skills.
Prescreening for Anger Management Participation
Certain groups of people should be evaluated before they are enrolled in an anger management program. When I say evaluated, I do not mean unilaterally ruled out, but prescreened. Certain kinds of people are more likely to benefit than others are from this type of work, and determining who they are is important before beginning any anger management work.
The first question should always be this: Why are you here? If the person is self-referred and motivated—great! If the person shows up because someone said that he or she had to be there—beware! Mandated therapies are notoriously difficult, particularly when people are getting help for behavioral patterns that may be ego syntonic (they like acting that way). People who are doing this work are more likely to benefit from it if they are there because they chose to be there. I am not opposed to discussing with clients the benefits that they can get from anger management training, which certainly includes satisfying the mandate of whoever made the referral. Ultimately, success or failure will come from the client, not from the leader, so the person has the choice of how to proceed. Often, when the issue is posed that way, the client will concede and stay, at least to check it out. If you demand that they stay and participate, you may be wasting each other's time. Sometimes, people do better by delaying their participation until they are ready to do the work.
The second question is this: Who is the client? As in all sport psychology interventions, this question is critical. The issue is about more than knowing who is going to sign the check. The more important issues involve who is expecting results and how they are going to know about them. Sorting this out ahead of time is necessary to avoid confidentiality concerns and ethical conflicts as well to create a safe therapeutic space for the work to be done.
The last area of prescreening, which may include pretest questionnaires or other psychological testing in rare cases, is whether the likely problem for the individual is a skills deficit or severe psychopathology or even psychopathy. Refer to chapter 3 for instruments that may help make this determination.
When I receive an anger management referral, whether clinical or sport related, I ask for information about a recent medical examination and any counseling history. The screening should ask direct questions about past or current pathology, including substance abuse, to ascertain whether the client would be best served in a more controlled arena, such as in individual sessions where clinical problems can be addressed along with the anger issues. If you are not psychologically trained, you should refer the client to someone with the proper background before you start down this path. It could quickly go to places that you never expected.
Individual Versus Group
As Bruce Hale and I explained in our chapter for Shane Murphy's Sport Psych Handbook, both individual and group interventions have pluses and minuses. These attributes should be considered when deciding how to implement anger management skills.
Individual counseling sessions allow greater exploration of incidents and issues that may be embarrassing if addressed in front of others. Furthermore, if a hidden psychopathology may present, especially a trauma-related issue, a group setting could be not only humiliating but also damaging. In addition, current teammates may soon be on opposing teams. Sharing thoughts and feelings may leave a person feeling vulnerable. Exploring those thoughts and feelings one-on-one in a safe environment may promote greater honesty; the lack thereof is a considerable obstacle to progress.
Group interventions offer the opportunity for a group of athletes to learn the skills together. This aspect may be particularly valuable when the intervention is for a whole team or parts thereof. Reinforcement can then occur outside the leader's office, and what is learned can be extended to new environments. In my experience, group sessions can have a significant team-building effect. Athletes learn more about how other athletes think. Through role playing, they can see how their peers react to situations that may also develop in other venues. This area would be another good topic for research. In research on these types of interventions, measures of team cohesion may provide some useful information. By learning each other's triggers, players can help their teammates regain composure and self-control in volatile situations rather than react in a destructive manner.
In no case, however, do I assign any athlete to be responsible for the behavior of another. I do believe that athletes influence each other and contribute to the culture in which decisions are made, but people must ultimately take responsibility for themselves. Collectively, the team takes responsibility for the team.
Finally, although role playing is an excellent way to teach the lessons that follow, and it tends to be more effective than a lecture-based format, the leader must strive to make the program exciting, interactive, and fun. People learn better when they are having fun.
Anger Management
Hey, how do you feel?
Good?
Fine?
OK?
Not bad?
No, how do you feel?
Several basic elements can hinder the effectiveness of anger management programs. The first is that most people do not know how to label their emotions. Any emotion management program must begin with teaching people how to recognize how they feel. Just as important is to recognize that the purpose is not truly to manage anger. The real purpose is to manage behavior associated with anger, or reactive aggression management. The place to start is with emotion labeling because as arousal increases, controlling emotions and related behavior becomes increasingly difficult.
Emotion Labeling
In my opinion, the deficit in emotional labeling has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. The cause may be our susceptibility to the more-is-better approach: “If one is good, then give me a thousand.” We have great difficulty identifying how we feel and how much we feel. After all, emotions have their own experience, which varies slightly from person to person, but they can also be experienced at different intensities, frequencies, and durations.
Nothing about any emotion is inherently good or bad. The judgment that we place on them is the single greatest obstacle to managing them. To expand, parents often tell their children that being angry is not good. Men are socialized as boys to hide their emotions, especially their fears and sadness, although they may be simultaneously confused by the intense football coach who encourages their anger and aggression. The 12-year-old Pop Warner football player who cries may be called a sissy, a girl—as if being a girl is a bad thing—or worse. I will focus more on communication between coaches and athletes later, but at the onset, we must divorce ourselves from the idea that having a particular emotion is good or bad. Making that sort of judgment is complete nonsense.
The way to go about teaching athletes to label their emotions is twofold. The easier way to start is to teach them how their bodies react during emotional changes. They have their bodies with them all the time, they tend to pay close attention to their bodies (in my experience, the only group of clients who pay more attention to how their bodies feel are substance abusers), and they can gain tangible results from controlling the physiological changes associated with emotion.
Ask your athletes to imagine for a moment that they are not young human athletes but instead cute fuzzy bunnies in the woods. (Expect some groaning from your young male athletes, but proceed anyway.) Set up this scenario. You are hopping along and out of nowhere, a giant grizzly bear pops out with its claws bared and saliva dripping from its fangs. It growls as it moves toward its next meal . . . you.
Are you scared?
You bet your butt! How do you know? Think about how your body feels. What must you do to survive? You need either to run or to get ready to fight. In either case, your body needs to prepare for action. The autonomic nervous system is the automatic, involuntary part of the nervous system. It has two parts. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the increase in the following functions, and the parasympathetic nervous system controls the decrease. A loose analogy would be that the sympathetic nervous system is the on switch and the parasympathetic nervous system is the off switch. It is not quite that simple because some bodily functions do not abide by those rules, but in a fight-or-flight situation—in which you must either run or fight to survive—the sympathetic nervous system kicks in full force.
Learn the difference between anger, aggression, and violence
Anger, aggression, and violence can surface while participating in sports and affect how the game is played.
A New Vernacular
I believe that the definitions used in the sport psychology field regarding anger and violence require streamlining. As we go through relevant terminology and definitions that I think should be standardized (if for no other reason than to have pragmatic language that people can agree on), I will explain why I have made refinements to previously used terms.
Anger
Anger is a normal emotion. Anger is neither good nor bad, and no judgment need be attached to it. Some people believe that a problem arises if a person becomes angry. This idea is not true. To pass judgment on anger and condemn those who admit to becoming angry is the equivalent of robbing people of their humanness. Disallowing oneself from any part of the human experience weakens the experience in its totality. Sadness gives a reference point that makes happiness more appreciated. Tension can be better understood when compared with relaxation. It is about time we stopped making value judgments about anger. No one has ever gotten in trouble for becoming angry. You could be furious right now, but no one would know it unless you demonstrated some behavior associated with the anger. The belief that anger is bad is so strongly engrained that people will sometimes deny its existence even when it is spilling out all over the place. We have all heard someone with a red face expel incendiary words accompanied by saliva and then follow up by saying, “I am not angry!” The bad rap that anger has received has made it even more resistant to examination.
Truth be told, anger can be harnessed and used as fuel to assist in performance. Can it interfere with performance? You bet! Does it have to? Absolutely not. I have helped athletes compete harder with greater intensity for longer periods, motivated by their anger. The issue is not a matter of eliminating anger; it is a matter of keeping it at a level where it assists, not detracts from, performance.
Studies have shown that as anger increases, cognitive processing speed goes down, fine motor coordination and sensitivity to pain decrease, and muscle strength often increases. So for some athletes doing some tasks, anger can be helpful. For example, the defensive lineman who must make his way past a blocker to make a tackle might benefit from having some level of anger. For other tasks, anger would be a hindrance. The quarterback who needs to read the defense before deciding which receiver to throw to would likely perform better if he was not angry. In fact, some research supports this thesis. Players at football positions that require a lot of decision making tend to demonstrate lower levels of anger than players at positions that do not.
Therefore, when we talk about anger management for peak performance in sport, we are not always talking about making athletes polite and calm. Rather, we are referring to their ability to self-regulate their emotions to what their tasks require.
Aggression
What does it mean to be aggressive? Definitions that have permeated sport psychology for decades have stated that aggression has harm to another as a goal. It is no wonder that people frown on aggression in sport; it means that someone has to get hurt. This statement is not true. The adverb aggressively describes the method by which people go after their goals. It refers to the tenacity, the hunger, and the determination that people embody when striving for accomplishments. I checked: The women who succeeded on Wall Street climbed the corporate ladder aggressively. Success in life is not just handed to people. They have to want it. They have to go get it themselves. At the heart of Nike's “Just Do It” campaign is the idea of not waiting for it to come to you. Instead, you go from being passive to active and doing it yourself. Aggression is a necessary requirement for success in sport and in life in general.
Aggressive behavior can be broken down into various categories. The delineation that makes the most sense is that between instrumental aggression and reactive aggression.
Instrumental aggression is goal-directed aggression in which harm to another is not the primary goal, although it can be a secondary result of the action. In sport, an example would be the basketball player who slashes to the basket, leaps over a defender, and accidentally catches another defender with an elbow on the way up to scoring two points with a resounding dunk. The goal was to put the ball in the hole, not to harm an opponent. People who participate in sport know that injury is always a possibility. Accidental injuries happen. No blame should be assigned, and nothing in the rules of the game bans these incidents. Instrumental aggression is the hallmark for success in life and in sport and should be encouraged.
Some authors have described instrumental aggression as assertiveness. I believe that in making this distinction, psychologists are trying to soften things up in defense of the position that aggression is bad. Let us examine this for a moment. To be assertive is to stand up for one's rights. In fact, in the psychotherapy world, assertiveness training is used for people who have self-esteem problems. We teach them communication skills (we will revisit this topic later in the book) that will help them effectively and appropriately have their needs met.
To illustrate how assertiveness is not the same as instrumental aggression, consider the following: The tailback is 10 yards out from the goal line. Three defenders block the path between him and six points. Will he assertively communicate to his opponents, “Excuse me, gentlemen, would it be OK if you just acquiesced and allowed me to run past you? After all, it is my right to score this touchdown, you know”? Of course not! The tailback has no entitlement to score. He has no right to win. He succeeds only by aggressively going after his goal. So when you see the tailback launch his body through the air like a missile trying to bowl over the last defender after skillfully dancing his way between the other two, do not think assertive; think Walter Payton—aggressive.
But that is not the whole story on aggression. Another type of aggression is called reactive aggression, sometimes referred to as hostile aggression. Reactive aggression is behavior that has as its primary and sometimes solitary goal to do harm to someone. Usually, this action is in response to a perceived injustice, insult, or wrongdoing. This form of aggression is related to anger and is the behavior that gets athletes in trouble, both on and off the field. An example of reactive aggression may be the pitcher who is furious that the last time a certain batter came to the plate, he hit a 450-foot (140-meter) homer that cleared the bleachers. Still fuming, the pitcher aims his 95 mile-per-hour (150-kilometer-per-hour) fastball between the hitter's shoulder blades.
Violence
Reactive aggression, in its most extreme forms, is violence, but the definition is not reflexive. Not all violence comes from anger and reactive aggression. Violence has, at its root, harm to another as its planned result.
Predatory violence, for example, is behavior in which the hunter seeks the hunted. In the animal world, the stealthy lion waits patiently in the brush for its prey to wander close enough to be ambushed. In the world of serial killers who hunt their victims, predators often do not have an increase in heart rate or sympathetic nervous system activity that usually accompanies anger. Anger is not related to this activity and in fact would interfere with the ability to hunt.
Terry and Jackson (1985) clarified sport violence as harm-inducing behavior outside the rules of sport, bearing no direct relationship to the competitive goals of sport. This definition nicely carved out a type of violence different from society's violence.
In an attempt to explain sport violence, I developed the Abrams model of sports violence (figure 1.1) that reflects the seeming overlap between aggression and violence. Understanding that injury can be part of the game, we can differentiate violence in the same way that we differentiate aggression. Incidental violence is violence that does not have harming another as its sole goal; it is directed toward sport goals. In contrast, reactive or hostile violence has the specific goal of causing harm to someone else.
Both represent behaviors that may go beyond the rules of the sport, but incidental violence is an extension of acceptable behavior. Checking in hockey provides a useful example. The line that differentiates checking from cross-checking or boarding, both of which are penalties, is often blurry. Overzealous players can certainly have their behavior spill over to being illegal. This behavior is different from reactive violence, in which the behavior is retaliatory. This kind of behavior can also be broken down into two categories. The first is the spontaneous response. There are some players who pride themselves on their ability to get inside their opponents' heads and will deliberately provoke them to take them off their game. New York Rangers forward Sean Avery, often described as an agitator, is particularly proficient at this. So, the player provokes the other repeatedly, perhaps by checking them with their stick. Finally, the provoking player checks the first player one too many times, and the player turns and swings the stick at the opponent's head. The response, although extreme, was not planned. This is spontaneous reactive aggression and is directly related to anger. Anger management programs specifically target reducing this type of behavior. More immediately though, the league or organization must penalize, fine, or suspend players engaging in such behavior as it can very easily cause serious injury.
Using psychological inventories to assess anger
Learn about different types of inventory methods and whether or not they work.
Using Psychological Inventories
The hallmark of psychology research is the self-report inventory. Many inventories were developed with the hope of capturing an emotion in a questionnaire. These too present problems.
The first problem with anger inventories is that they tend to be high in what researchers call face validity. The validity of a test is the extent to which it measures what it is supposed to measure. Face validity is the extent to which a test, on the face of it, measures what it is supposed to. Subjects who take tests that are high in face validity can easily tell what the researcher is measuring. For an emotional state like anger, which many people recognize has a negative connotation; subjects can provide answers that depict themselves in a favorable light. The test is easily faked. For that matter, if a subject wants the researcher to draw a particular conclusion, he or she can make the test show those results. Subjects respond in the ways that they do on such tests for many reasons. Those with an acquiescence bias will give the answer that they believe the researcher wants. Some want to paint themselves in a positive light. Some really do not pay attention to how they feel, and their self-report may not be based on reality. Some people lie. This may surprise you, but some people who lie do not have a specific reason to do so. A common false assumption is that people lie only if they have a good reason to do so, if they have something to gain. But, people lie for the fun of it, for the excitement of it, because they enjoy deceiving people, or for no reason at all. And the problem is that on these tests, it is hard to tell when someone is lying if the person lies consistently throughout the answers.
The second problem with anger scales is that a one-to-one correlation does not exist between measures on self-report inventories and behavior. Does every person who scores high on anger scales get in fights? No. One might even hypothesize that athletes who scores high on a self-report measure are less likely to act out because they have some awareness of their anger. Moreover, many of these scales were originally developed to measure pathology. Suppose that a student scored higher than everyone else in the class but her or his score did not reach the threshold of where anger is considered a problem. Can we say that this student is angrier than the other students? Maybe, but what does it mean? Not much.
The last problem with self-report measures is that even the ones that measure anger in state (being in an angry state right now) and trait (pervasive pattern of anger) dimensions, if not given when respondents are angry, may not reflect the true intensity of their emotions.
Nonetheless, self-report questionnaires are probably the best standardized tools that we have. Although several are available, I am going to focus on two that seem to be the most commonly used in the sport and clinical psychology literatures.
Profile of Moods States (POMS)
Originally developed in 1971 by McNair, Lorr, and Droppleman, the Profile of Mood States (POMS) has been cited in approximately 300 articles in the sport and exercise psychology literature. The test is a self-report measure in which subjects report on a Likert scale to what degree they experience the word describing an emotional state. The 65 words or phrases load into six mood states: tension, depression, anger, vigor, fatigue, and confusion. These six states can then be charted and their relative elevations noted.
Early research by William Morgan in the 1970s yielded the “iceberg profile” of elite athletes. While consulting with the United States Olympic Committee, Morgan found that successful elite athletes could be differentiated from unsuccessful candidates by this profile. Successful athletes had an elevation in vigor but much lower values for all the other mood states. This model has come under greater scrutiny over time, most notably in a meta-analysis of the articles that studied the iceberg profile (Rowley et al., 1995). Although that study found the iceberg profile to be a weak predictor of athletic success, the Profile of Mood States is still widely used and is currently found in approximately 1,500 published articles when you include studies outside of sport psychology as well.
The ease of administration paired with its established place in the sport psychology world makes the POMS one of the two instruments of choice in measuring anger in sport.
State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2)
The State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2), developed by psychologist Charles Spielberger, is the gold standard for anger assessment. STAXI-2 is a self-report inventory that measures anger in multiple dimensions. By responding to 57 items on a four-point scale (with 1 equating to “not at all” or “almost never” and 4 equating to “very much so” or “almost always”) assessment of the subjects' anger includes “either the intensity of their angry feelings at a particular time or how frequently anger is experienced, expressed, suppressed or controlled.” (Spielberger, STAXI-2 Manual, p. 4) The inventory is simple to administer, requiring only about 15 minutes, is normed for adolescents and adults, and is written at a sixth-grade reading level. Although it has not been normed specifically on athletes, its utility makes it ripe for such an extension. Finally, the inventory can be administered individually or in group settings.
The STAXI-2 measures anger along seven major scales and five subscales:
1. State Anger (S-Ang)—the intensity of and extent to which a person feels like expressing anger at a particular time.
a. Feeling Angry (S-Ang/F)—the intensity of the anger that the person is currently experiencing.
b. Feel Like Expressing Anger Verbally (S-Ang/V)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger verbally.
c. Feel Like Expressing Physically (S-Ang/P)—the intensity of the current feelings to express the anger physically.
2. Trait Anger (T-Ang)—how often angry feelings are experienced over time.
a. Angry Temperament (T-Ang/T)—measures the disposition to experience anger without specific provocation.
b. Angry Reaction (T-Ang/R)—the frequency that angry feelings are experienced in situations that involved frustration or negative evaluations.
3. Anger Expression-Out (AX-O)—how often anger is expressed in verbally or physically aggressive behavior.
4. Anger Expression-In (AX-I)—how often anger is experienced but not expressed.
5. Anger Control-Out (AC-O)—how often the person controls the outward expression of anger.
6. Anger Control-In (AC-I)—how often a person attempts to calm down to control angry feelings.
7. Anger Expression Index (AX Index)—a general index of anger expression.
As can be seen, the STAXI-2 does not just measure anger along different dimensions; it also taps the different methods that subjects report using to manage their anger. In my opinion, it is the most useful anger assessment tool available because it not only describes the person's anger but also gives the sport psychologist the starting point of knowing how the person assesses his or her own anger management tendencies.
Considering the lack of study that anger, aggression, and violence have received in sport psychology as a whole, it is not surprising that few sport-specific anger measures are available. The Bredemeier Athletic Aggression Inventory (BAAGI) (Bredemeier, 1975) deserves some attention because it measures instrumental aggression as well as reactive aggression. Following the theme that instrumental aggression is what we want to reinforce and reactive aggression is related to anger and needs to be curbed, this instrument may prove to have significant utility in future anger management studies of athletes.
One of the newer instruments to be introduced is the Competitive Aggressiveness and Anger Scale (CAAS; Maxwell & Moores, 2007) developed by Jon Maxwell and his colleagues in Hong Kong. Initial findings suggest that the CAAS is a valid scale for the measurement of aggressive tendencies (aggressiveness) and anger in sport. Because it attempts to overcome the shortcomings of other instruments, it has promise.
Developing anger management programs for athletes
The program uses guidelines to identify and manage anger.
The culmination of the previous chapters leads us to the “How To” of anger management. As should be clear by now, getting angry in and of itself, is not a problem. It is the high levels of anger that lead to reactive aggression. The program that is outlined below provides guidelines on how to recognize one's emotion levels and control them. This is done by becoming aware of one's body, how it changes when one is very angry, and different methods to both calm down when very angry as well as ways to avoid getting so angry in the first place. These techniques are truly cognitive and behavioral skills.
Prescreening for Anger Management Participation
Certain groups of people should be evaluated before they are enrolled in an anger management program. When I say evaluated, I do not mean unilaterally ruled out, but prescreened. Certain kinds of people are more likely to benefit than others are from this type of work, and determining who they are is important before beginning any anger management work.
The first question should always be this: Why are you here? If the person is self-referred and motivated—great! If the person shows up because someone said that he or she had to be there—beware! Mandated therapies are notoriously difficult, particularly when people are getting help for behavioral patterns that may be ego syntonic (they like acting that way). People who are doing this work are more likely to benefit from it if they are there because they chose to be there. I am not opposed to discussing with clients the benefits that they can get from anger management training, which certainly includes satisfying the mandate of whoever made the referral. Ultimately, success or failure will come from the client, not from the leader, so the person has the choice of how to proceed. Often, when the issue is posed that way, the client will concede and stay, at least to check it out. If you demand that they stay and participate, you may be wasting each other's time. Sometimes, people do better by delaying their participation until they are ready to do the work.
The second question is this: Who is the client? As in all sport psychology interventions, this question is critical. The issue is about more than knowing who is going to sign the check. The more important issues involve who is expecting results and how they are going to know about them. Sorting this out ahead of time is necessary to avoid confidentiality concerns and ethical conflicts as well to create a safe therapeutic space for the work to be done.
The last area of prescreening, which may include pretest questionnaires or other psychological testing in rare cases, is whether the likely problem for the individual is a skills deficit or severe psychopathology or even psychopathy. Refer to chapter 3 for instruments that may help make this determination.
When I receive an anger management referral, whether clinical or sport related, I ask for information about a recent medical examination and any counseling history. The screening should ask direct questions about past or current pathology, including substance abuse, to ascertain whether the client would be best served in a more controlled arena, such as in individual sessions where clinical problems can be addressed along with the anger issues. If you are not psychologically trained, you should refer the client to someone with the proper background before you start down this path. It could quickly go to places that you never expected.
Individual Versus Group
As Bruce Hale and I explained in our chapter for Shane Murphy's Sport Psych Handbook, both individual and group interventions have pluses and minuses. These attributes should be considered when deciding how to implement anger management skills.
Individual counseling sessions allow greater exploration of incidents and issues that may be embarrassing if addressed in front of others. Furthermore, if a hidden psychopathology may present, especially a trauma-related issue, a group setting could be not only humiliating but also damaging. In addition, current teammates may soon be on opposing teams. Sharing thoughts and feelings may leave a person feeling vulnerable. Exploring those thoughts and feelings one-on-one in a safe environment may promote greater honesty; the lack thereof is a considerable obstacle to progress.
Group interventions offer the opportunity for a group of athletes to learn the skills together. This aspect may be particularly valuable when the intervention is for a whole team or parts thereof. Reinforcement can then occur outside the leader's office, and what is learned can be extended to new environments. In my experience, group sessions can have a significant team-building effect. Athletes learn more about how other athletes think. Through role playing, they can see how their peers react to situations that may also develop in other venues. This area would be another good topic for research. In research on these types of interventions, measures of team cohesion may provide some useful information. By learning each other's triggers, players can help their teammates regain composure and self-control in volatile situations rather than react in a destructive manner.
In no case, however, do I assign any athlete to be responsible for the behavior of another. I do believe that athletes influence each other and contribute to the culture in which decisions are made, but people must ultimately take responsibility for themselves. Collectively, the team takes responsibility for the team.
Finally, although role playing is an excellent way to teach the lessons that follow, and it tends to be more effective than a lecture-based format, the leader must strive to make the program exciting, interactive, and fun. People learn better when they are having fun.
Anger Management
Hey, how do you feel?
Good?
Fine?
OK?
Not bad?
No, how do you feel?
Several basic elements can hinder the effectiveness of anger management programs. The first is that most people do not know how to label their emotions. Any emotion management program must begin with teaching people how to recognize how they feel. Just as important is to recognize that the purpose is not truly to manage anger. The real purpose is to manage behavior associated with anger, or reactive aggression management. The place to start is with emotion labeling because as arousal increases, controlling emotions and related behavior becomes increasingly difficult.
Emotion Labeling
In my opinion, the deficit in emotional labeling has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. The cause may be our susceptibility to the more-is-better approach: “If one is good, then give me a thousand.” We have great difficulty identifying how we feel and how much we feel. After all, emotions have their own experience, which varies slightly from person to person, but they can also be experienced at different intensities, frequencies, and durations.
Nothing about any emotion is inherently good or bad. The judgment that we place on them is the single greatest obstacle to managing them. To expand, parents often tell their children that being angry is not good. Men are socialized as boys to hide their emotions, especially their fears and sadness, although they may be simultaneously confused by the intense football coach who encourages their anger and aggression. The 12-year-old Pop Warner football player who cries may be called a sissy, a girl—as if being a girl is a bad thing—or worse. I will focus more on communication between coaches and athletes later, but at the onset, we must divorce ourselves from the idea that having a particular emotion is good or bad. Making that sort of judgment is complete nonsense.
The way to go about teaching athletes to label their emotions is twofold. The easier way to start is to teach them how their bodies react during emotional changes. They have their bodies with them all the time, they tend to pay close attention to their bodies (in my experience, the only group of clients who pay more attention to how their bodies feel are substance abusers), and they can gain tangible results from controlling the physiological changes associated with emotion.
Ask your athletes to imagine for a moment that they are not young human athletes but instead cute fuzzy bunnies in the woods. (Expect some groaning from your young male athletes, but proceed anyway.) Set up this scenario. You are hopping along and out of nowhere, a giant grizzly bear pops out with its claws bared and saliva dripping from its fangs. It growls as it moves toward its next meal . . . you.
Are you scared?
You bet your butt! How do you know? Think about how your body feels. What must you do to survive? You need either to run or to get ready to fight. In either case, your body needs to prepare for action. The autonomic nervous system is the automatic, involuntary part of the nervous system. It has two parts. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the increase in the following functions, and the parasympathetic nervous system controls the decrease. A loose analogy would be that the sympathetic nervous system is the on switch and the parasympathetic nervous system is the off switch. It is not quite that simple because some bodily functions do not abide by those rules, but in a fight-or-flight situation—in which you must either run or fight to survive—the sympathetic nervous system kicks in full force.