One hundred and twenty men referred for treatment for wife assault and forty demographic controls completed self‐report questionnaires assessing attachment patterns, anger, jealousy, Borderline Personality Organization, and trauma symptoms. This constellation, with the exception of attachment, has been found to represent a profile related significantly to the frequency of both verbal and physical abuse. In the present study, attachment was found to correlate significantly with these other measures. A measure of secure attachment correlated significantly, but negatively, with the constellation measures. A measure of fearful attachment correlated significantly and positively. A preoccupied attachment pattern correlated with the other measures less strongly than did the fearful measure. A dismissing measure was not correlated with any constellation measures. The role of attachment anger is discussed; it is suggested that fearful attachment could also be described as angry attachment. The concept of intimacy anger is introduced from early studies in attachment and applied to the explanation of assaultiveness in adult relationships.

The present study is an extension of research that examined the relationship between borderline personality organization (BPO), anger (assessed with the Multidimensional Anger Inventory [MAI]), and wife abuse in 120 men who had committed wife assault. Seventy-five female partners reported on physical and psychological abuse by the men, using the Conflict Tactics Scale and the Psychological Maltreatment of Women Inventory. The men's BPO self-report scores correlated significantly with their partners' reports of their abusiveness as assessed by these scales. Three self-report subscale scores on the MAl and one on the BPO scale accounted for 50% of the variance in their partners' reports of domination and isolation, and for 35% of the women's reports of emotional abuse.

One hundred and forty men referred for wife assault and 45 demographically matched controls were assessed for psychological variables associated with abusive personality (anger, cyclical (borderline) (Dutton, 1995b, Dutton andStarzomski, 1993), the current study suggests a personality syndrome of assaultive males that has antecedents in the early experiences of these men. The present data suggest that fami~ of origin experiences may have effects beyond modeling of abusive behaviors. These effects include development of a specific personality form associated with abusiveness.

Shame-proneness has been found to be related to anger arousal and a tendency to externalize attributions for one’s own behavior, both common features of men who assault their wives. The present study examined a potential origin of a shame-prone style by analysing reports of shaming experiences by ones’ parents as reported by a population of assaultive males. Significant relationships were found for recollections of shaming actions by parents on adult anger, abusiveness (as reported by the men’s wives), and a constellation of personality variables related to abusiveness in prior research. These associations maintained even after corrections were made for response sets such as social desirability. These shaming actions were largely comprised of recollections of parental punishment that were public, random, or global. The role of shame experiences in disturbances of self-identity and rage is discussed.

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