2018 Abstracts

Title: The Fox Anger Inventory: A New Way to Measure State Anger Author: Logan Ashworth, Mentor: Michelle Grimes Affiliation: Southern Utah University Poster Presentation Introduction Tests that purport to measure anger most often measure trait anger as opposed to state anger. There are few measures of state anger available in the public domain. The purpose of the current study was to construct a new measure of state anger, the Fox Anger Inventory (FAI), which records state anger by presenting respondents with a series of items that include emotionally-valenced words as response options. The words chosen for the FAI were taken from the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) database (Bradley & Lang, 2017). We hypothesize the FAI will demonstrate adequate internal consistency and construct validity. This project is currently in the IRB approval process, data collection is projected to be complete by December, 2017. Methods Approximately 60 participants will be recruited from Southern Utah University PSY 1010 classes. Participants complete the FAI and the the State Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI-2; Spielberger, 1988). The order of completion will be chosen at random. Participants will receive course credit in their PSY 1010 class for completing the survey. Results We predict the FAI will demonstrate internal consistency with cronbach’s alpha estimates of .80 or higher. Further, we predict the FAI will demonstrate construct validity through a positively correlated to the STAXI-2. Conclusion If our hypothesis is supported, this will provide evidence that the FAI is a reliable and valid measure of state anger. Specifically, adequate internal consistency estimates will provide evidence of reliability. A strong positive correlation between the FAI and the STAXI-2 will indicate construct validity. If our hypothesis is not supported our measure will not be a viable tool to measure state anger. Implications for the project, as well as future directions will be discussed.