Symposia
Anger
Raymond DiGiuseppe, ABPP, Ph.D. (he/him/his)
Professor
St. John's University
Queens, New York
Annette Schieffelin, B.A.
Doctoral Research Fellow
St. John’s University
Queens, New York
CBT approaches to anger management (amCBT) have targeted the same cognitive constructs for the past 40 years. These include the cognitive distortions, irrational beliefs, and misattributions that CBT targets in other emotional disorders. The Code of Honor (CoH) is a construct developed in social psychology that predicts anger, aggression, violence, and murder. In this paper, we will 1, define CoH, 2, discuss its relationship to commonly used measures of dysfunctional anger and aggression. 3, compare how it predicts the constructs commonly targeted in amCBT, and 4 how to address CoH in amCBT.
CoH represents a set of cognitions, beliefs, and attitudes held by an individual about his or her reputation and how this reputation is changed or maintained to achieve personal status and reputation within groups using aggression. CoH is based on the recalibration theory of low-status compensation, where people use aggression to change the view that others have of them. CoH usually involves the ideas of perceived threat to one’s esteem or honor, revenge, and displaced aggression to improve the respect or fear of reprisals that a person projects in a group. People who hold CoH believe that they should retaliate against the actor or any other person present who displays any sign of disrespect, personal slight, or perceived offense to prevent others from engaging in more attacks.
Based on two large samples, we report that CoH can be reliably assessed. CoH is usually thought to be more highly endorsed by youth in gangs or people in lower SES. The opposite is accurate, and CoH is endorsed more by people of higher incomes and educational attainment. Our result from hierarchical regression demonstrates that CoH predicts dysfunctional anger significantly better than the commonly target constructs in amCBT, such as irrational beliefs, hostile attributions, condemnation of the angry target, frustration intolerance, problem-solving skills, overgeneralizations, and hostile attributions. Self-acceptance was shown to be a protective factor in reducing CoH.
We propose that amCBT has been less effective because treatment has not targeted the most pervasive and robust cognitive construct related to dysfunctional anger – CoH. Such interventions would involve beliefs that others will retaliate, the need for revenge, the overvaluation of respect, and increasing self-acceptance. We will review some difficulties in targeting CoH and provide a case example.