ANGER MANAGEMENT

Anger Management in Sport

Anger Management in Sport

Introduction

In recent years, there has been a growing interest and awareness in sport psychology. The exact nature of what is involved, however, is not widely understood. There are various psychological issues in sport performance like Positive and Negative Thinking, Motivation and Commitment, Goal Setting, Attention and Focus, Stress, anger, and Anxiety, Coping Skills, Over-training and Burnout (Murphy, 2005, 242 ). The purpose of this study is to examine an area that has previously been little explored regarding management and expression of anger in sports. In this paper, among different psychological issues of sport anger management shall be discussed.

Anger

As we all know, anger is a common experience. Everyone feels angry at some point, and some people feel angry all the time or get angry easily. Being angry means that someone is dissatisfied with someone else, him or herself, or the current state of affairs. Furthermore, anger motivates people to initiate a corrective action—to change their state of affairs. Anger is not inherently pathological, even if it is commonly experienced as unpleasant by either the angry person or by others interacting with the angry person. Anger is sometimes confused with aggression and hostility, but these constructs differ.

Anger is an emotional experience, whereas aggression is behaviour, and hostility is an attitude. There are several major models of anger, each with their own definitions of anger. These include cognitive appraisal models of anger, the cognitive-neoassociationistic model of anger, and the systemic model of anger model of anger. Anger and aggression are instinctive responses to the frustration of impulses. Anger is primarily an interpersonal emotion; more likely associated with friends and loved ones than with strangers, with a goal of correcting a perceived wrong, rather than hurting the target (Terry, & Jackson, 2005, 27).

Characteristics of Anger

Anger is a felt emotional state that has these characteristics: it varies in intensity, duration, and frequency; it is associated with cognitive distortions, verbal and motor behaviours, and patterns of physical arousal; and it usually include a perception of blameworthiness. Anger also presents more difficulty for a person who is engaged in a complex task than for one who is engaged in a simple task. In another view anger is characterized by six elements: frequency; intensity; duration; threshold at which the person becomes angry; expression or way of manifesting anger; and degree of comfort the person experiences with having angry feelings. Other characteristics of anger are that it may be inhibited, transformed, displaced onto another target, or manifest target of the anger comes to stand for the latent or real target.

Williams, (2010) identified 61 characteristics of anger. Some of these include demandingness, in which someone or something should be different from it is; condemnation, which is an element of anger at a person; punitiveness, which flows from anger and is integral to its existence; anger as an agent of control; and anger as disguised hurt. Other characteristics of anger included anger as emotional weakness rather than strength; fear; worry; anger being ...