Open Access
September 2009 Statistical modeling of the time course of tantrum anger
Peihua Qiu, Rong Yang, Michael Potegal
Ann. Appl. Stat. 3(3): 1013-1034 (September 2009). DOI: 10.1214/09-AOAS242

Abstract

Although anger is an important emotion that underlies much overt aggression at great social cost, little is known about how to quantify anger or to specify the relationship between anger and the overt behaviors that express it. This paper proposes a novel statistical model which provides both a metric for the intensity of anger and an approach to determining the quantitative relationship between anger intensity and the specific behaviors that it controls. From observed angry behaviors, we reconstruct the time course of the latent anger intensity and the linkage between anger intensity and the probability of each angry behavior. The data on which this analysis is based consist of observed tantrums had by 296 children in the Madison WI area during the period 1994–1996. For each tantrum, eight angry behaviors were recorded as occurring or not within each consecutive 30-second unit. So, the data can be characterized as a multivariate, binary, longitudinal (MBL) dataset with a latent variable (anger intensity) involved. Data such as these are common in biomedical, psychological and other areas of the medical and social sciences. Thus, the proposed modeling approach has broad applications.

Citation

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Peihua Qiu. Rong Yang. Michael Potegal. "Statistical modeling of the time course of tantrum anger." Ann. Appl. Stat. 3 (3) 1013 - 1034, September 2009. https://doi.org/10.1214/09-AOAS242

Information

Published: September 2009
First available in Project Euclid: 5 October 2009

zbMATH: 1196.62149
MathSciNet: MR2750384
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1214/09-AOAS242

Keywords: Anger , categorical data , emotion , generalized estimating equations , latent variables , longitudinal data , multiple binary responses , parametric logistic regression

Rights: Copyright © 2009 Institute of Mathematical Statistics

Vol.3 • No. 3 • September 2009
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