Anger in Children’s Tantrums: A New, Quantitative, Behaviorally Based Model

Because excessive anger in early childhood can predict later psychopathology, quantifying its intensity and time course is clinically important. Anger consists of a set of experiential, physiological, and behavioral responses whose coherence is sufficient to justify the assumption of a common latent variable that can vary in intensity. The relationships between anger intensity and various anger-driven behaviors in children’s tantrums are probabilistic, nonlinear, and different for each individual behavior. Although any one behavior can provide only a partial and indirect measure of anger intensity, the entire trajectory of anger across the tantrum may be reconstructed by combining the observed temporal distributions of the various behaviors. In particular, we observed that behaviors characteristic of lower intensities of anger tend to occur at both the beginning and the end of tantrums while behaviors linked to higher intensities of anger are distributed around a single early peak. Accordingly, our anger intensity-behavioral linkage function model reconstructs a single, common, latent anger intensity variable, MA(t), whose rise and fall controls the momentary probability of eight angry tantrum behaviors through linkage functions that are unique to each behavior. We introduce the MA50 as a practical measure of the “characteristic” intensity of the eight angry behaviors and note how the model may inform study of the neural substrates of anger. 12.