Martijn van Teffelen

Hierarchical structure of hostility 25 2 INTRODUCTION In psychological research, human antagonistic behavior and its’ related cognitive-affective experiences are often operationalized by the terms anger, hostility, or aggression. Unfortunately, these and other related terms (e.g., irritability, agitation, and frustration) are often used interchangeably. Some use the same term for different constructs (i.e., the jingle fallacy), while others use different terms for the same construct (i.e., the jangle fallacy) (Anderson & Bushman, 2002). For example, one may refer to hostility as the ‘cognitive component’ (Smith, 1992; Spielberger et al., 1985), while others refer to hostility as the interrelated elements of cynical beliefs, angry feelings, and aggressive responding (Chaplin, 1982). Some have referred to anger as the ‘affective component’ (Ramirez & Andreu, 2006; Spielberger, 1999), while others refer to anger as a combination of cognitive (i.e., biased information processing) and affective factors (Wilkowski & Robinson, 2008). There are researchers who refer to anger as ‘irritability’ (Vidal-Ribas et al., 2016). Also, the behavioral component of hostility is often restricted to observable aggressive behavior (Anderson & Bushman, 2002), while others refer to aggression as the sum of physical/verbal aggressive behavior, attitudinal hostile beliefs, and angry responsiveness (Buss & Perry, 1992). Moreover, many self-report measures in the field also use a wide array of terms that even combine two concepts such as ‘anger expression’, ‘hostile aggression’, ‘affective aggression’ and ‘angry hostility’, adding further confusion. Adding to this confusion, two theoretical perspectives can be distinguished that conceptualize hostility and its related cognitive-affective experiences. The first, a unidimensional perspective conceptualizes hostility as one construct that includes the interrelated elements of cynical beliefs about others and the world, hostile attribution bias (i.e., the tendency to interpret emotionally ambiguous scenarios as hostile), angry emotional states, and aggressive behavior (American Psychiatric Association, 2013; Barefoot, 1992; Chaplin, 1982). The second, a multidimensional perspective conceptualizes hostility in terms of a broad conceptual domain that consists out of two or more lower-level facets (Buss, 1961; Smith, 1992; Spielberger et al., 1985). Empirical evidence tends to converge with this multidimensional perspective of hostility. That is, exploratory factor analytic (EFA) studies generally find multifactorial solutions (Buss & Perry, 1992; Maier et al., 2009; Martin et al., 2000; Musante et al., 1989). Typically, these studies include multiple measurements of hostility and apply EFA to identify the optimal number of factors. Part of the confusion surrounding the concept of hostility can be attributed to diverging results from these exploratory studies. Some previous studies demonstrated two factors such as anger expression and anger experience (Buss & Durkee, 1957; Fuqua et al., 1991; Martin et al., 2000; Musante et al., 1989). Others reported three-factor solutions, distinguishing affect, behavior, and cognition (Kopper & Epperson, 1996; Martin et al., 2000; Riley & Treiber, 1989) – also referred to as the ABC-model (Hilgard, 1980), or similarly the AHA-model (i.e., anger, hostility, aggression) (Spielberger et al., 1985). Finally, also a four-factor