Scientific literature often contrasts aggression with agreeableness, a personality trait characterized by trust, straightforwardness, altruism, compliance, modesty and tender-mindedness. While the exact nature of the relation between agreeableness and aggression–and how the former reduces risk of the latter–is not fully understood, it is known that cognition often serves as a bridge between personality traits and behavior.
Anger rumination, or the “unintentional, reoccurring reflection on experiences of anger that engages in fantasies of revenge, accompanied by anger”, is known to predict aggression, making it a viable candidate for the cognitive mediator between agreeableness and aggression. This was the hypothesis a team of Chinese researchers hoped to confirm with their study, published in Current Psychology.
To test their theory that individuals high in agreeableness would be less given to rumination and thus less prone to anger, the authors measured the levels of these three factors in 942 individuals, using a cross-lagged longitudinal model, a statistical manipulation that allows for a stronger demonstration of causal relationships between factors.
The results confirm the researchers’ hypothesis, providing the first empirical evidence that agreeableness negatively predicts anger rumination, and that furthermore, anger rumination does indeed mediate the relationship between agreeableness and aggression. Individuals with high levels of agreeableness are less aggressive, at least in part, because they ruminate less on experiences of anger.
The authors offer a few reasons for why this might be. Agreeable individuals may have fewer negative interpersonal experiences, for example, giving them fewer experiences on which to ruminate. They may also use more effective positive cognitive coping styles. More research will be needed to understand exactly how agreeableness, rumination and aggression are related, but the authors’ findings serve to confirm the relationship.
The value of such findings may seem more immediately scientific than practical, but it’s worth bearing in mind that personality traits are not immutable and that there exist effective countermeasures to anger rumination. Individuals whose levels of aggression are harmful to others and themselves may thus benefit from such approaches.
Furthermore, if the authors are correct that fewer conflicts leads to less rumination, the overall effect may be one of a virtuous cycle, such that less rumination leads to fewer conflicts, leading to less rumination, and so on.
Aggression and aggressive behaviors are harmful to aggressors and victims. Studies like this that help researchers, clinicians and therapists to better understand the traits and cognitive styles that lead to it are invaluable for reducing its prevalence in society.
The study, “The longitudinal relationships among agreeableness, anger rumination, and aggression“, was authored by Fangying Quan, Rujiao Yang, and Ling-Xiang Xia.
