Dispositional style for expressing anger and suicidal behavior in patientsof a psychosomatic clinic

We compared 475 patients with at least one suicide attempt in their life wi th 3737 patients without former suicide attempts in their behavioral dispos itions for depression, anxiety, anger and anger coping styles. At the begin ning of their stay in a psychosomatic hospital all patients filled out a sh ort version of the General Depression Scale, the trait anxiety scale of the STAI, and the trait anger and the anger coping scales of the STAXI. Result s show that patients with former suicide attempts scored higher than patien ts without suicide attempts on depression, trait anxiety, trait-anger, ange r-in, and anger-out. These differences were greater for patients between 50 and 75 years than for the younger age groups. A discriminant analysis conf irmed that dispositional measures of depression, anxiety, anger and anger-o ut entered the discriminant function while anger-in and anger control did n ot further contribute to the explanation of variance between the two groups .