Assessment of Anger Expression Patterns and its Management among Students in Bushehr University of Medical Sciences

Anger is a negative feeling state associated with cognitive disorder, physiologic changes, and behavioral reactions. Uncontrolled anger causes physical and mental disorders and can be expressed in various forms like violence, self-harm, physical and verbal aggression. The aim of this study is to assess anger expression patterns and its management among the students of Bushehr Medical Sciences University.
In this descriptive- analytical study, 300 students were selected by proportionate stratified random sampling. Data were collected by structured anger management and self-administered questionnaire adopted from Understanding Yourself book. Data analysis was done by SPSS software, version 20. Descriptive statistics, Independent Sample t-test were used for analysis of data.
The mean age of participants were 21.36 ± 1.76. The mean score of anger in personal relationship and social relationship were 21.80 ± 5.11 and 26.31 ± 4.32 respectively. Less than half of students were able to manage anger (47.2%) while 52.8% of them suppressed it. Feeling of anger in the social relationship among male students was significantly higher than female students (p=0.019). No significant relationship was found between total anger score with residential place and marital status (p>0.05).
This study showed more than half of students were not able to manage their anger. It is necessary to program training anger management skills for promoting the students’ mental health during education course.