What makes people angry? Laypersons' and psychologists' categorisations of anger in the family

People's categorisations of anger causes were examined in these studies, in order to obtain a layperson taxonomy of anger causes in families, and to compare this taxonomy to those created by psychologists. In Study 1, college students sorted descriptions of anger-eliciting events in family relationships. Hierarchical cluster analyses of their classifications resulted in a total of 15 separate categories of causes for the three types of familial relationships. These categories conformed to a prototypical format and varied in interesting ways across relationship and gender. Study 2 compared the students' classification schemes to five different schemes developed by psychologists. Considerable overlap in students' and psychologists' categorisations was demonstrated for some categories of causes, but not for others. Study 3 examined the three dimensions along which layperson and psychologist classifications might differ. The dimensions of specific versus abstract and experiential versus scientific seemed to account for some of the differences between psychologists' and laypersons' classifications found in Study 2. The dimension of description versus explanation did not account for differences, but may account for similarities in the two types of classifications. We suggest that people's perceptions of causes better capture the phenomenal experience of anger, whereas psychologists' theoretical models of anger better capture the underlying structures.