Anger Rumination Scale (ARS)

The Anger Rumination Scale (ARS) is a scale to measure anger rumination or “the tendency to focus on angry moods, recall past anger episodes, and think over the causes and consequences of anger episodes”. It has 19 items and four sub scales: Angry Afterthoughts, Thoughts of Revenge, Angry Memories, and Understanding of Causes.

ITEM CODING

It comprises of 19 items rated on a four point Likert scaleranging from 1 = almost never to 4 = almost always

Possible scores on the angry after-thoughts range from 6 to 42 with higher scores indicating more angry aftert-houghts.Thoughts of revenge and understanding causes sub-scales yield scores that range from 4to 28 with higher scores indicating more thoughts of revenge and more time spent trying to understand causes. Possible scores on the angry memories subscale range from 5 to 35 with higher scores indicating more angry memories. All the items were phrased so that higher score correspond to greater levels of anger rumination. There are no reverse scored items and scores are a sum of each item.

SCALES

Angry Afterthoughts

ARS_ANGTHTS (‘ARS19’, ‘ARS18’, ‘ARS9’, ‘ARS7’, ‘ARS8’, ‘ARS14’)

Thoughts of Revenge

ARS_REV (‘ARS4’, ‘ARS16’, ‘ARS13’, ‘ARS6’)

Angry Memories

ARS_MEM (‘ARS2’, ‘ARS3’, ‘ARS15’, ‘ARS1’, ‘ARS5’)

Understanding of Causes.

ARS_CAUSE (‘ARS12’, ‘ARS17’, ‘ARS11’, ‘ARS10’)

RESOURCE FILES

R Scoring Syntax file

Questionnaire

REFERENCES

Sukhodolsky, D. G., Golub, A., & Cromwell, E. N. (2001). Development and validation of the anger rumination scale. Personality and Individual Differences, 31, 689-700.

See Barber et al. (2005) for scoring ref