Anger, Emotional Expressivity and Psychological Well-Being in Sports Players

The objective of the present study is to observe whether there is a difference between boys and girls engaged in Instrumental Aggression Sports and those engaged in Hostile Aggression Sports with respect to anger, emotional expressivity and psychological well-being and to observe whether there is a relationship between these variables. A non-probability purposive sampling method was used to select a sample of 160 sports players, among whom 80 (40 boys and 40 girls) were engaged in instrumental aggression sports and 80 (40 boys and 40 girls) were engaged in hostile aggression sports. The Multidimensional Anger Inventory (Siegel, 1986), Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire (Gross, & John, 1998) and Psychological Well Being Scale (Ryff& Keyes, 1995) were administered to the participants. The results showed significant gender differences with respect to the dimension of anger arousal (p<0.05). However, no significant differences were found between the sport players engaged in instrumental aggression and those engaged in hostile aggression with respect to anger, emotional expressivity, and psychological well-being. The results also reveal that anger was positively correlated with emotional expressivity and negatively correlated with psychological well-being in both the groups (p<0.05). Additionally, emotional expressivity was negatively correlated with psychological well-being in sports players engaged in instrumental aggression sports and hostile aggression sports (p<0.05). The present study brings to light the toxic effects of anger and how we can learn to process emotions to augment effective functioning and psychological well-being.