Irrational and Evaluative Beliefs in Individuals with Anger Disorders

Evaluative beliefs have long been regarded as hot cognitions fundamental to the arousal of emotion. Previous research on anger has predominantly focused on inferential beliefs, with explorations of evaluative beliefs largely ignored. Therefore, this paper presents an investigation of the nature of evaluative beliefs in individuals with anger disorders. To investigate the experimental hypotheses that individuals with anger disorders will report high levels of hostile related evaluative beliefs, two methodologies were applied to a clinical sample of individuals with anger disorders. Individuals with anger disorders reported hostile evaluative beliefs, but interestingly it was evident that such individuals endorsed high levels of negative self-evaluation. The implications of these findings for future research and clinical work are discussed.