Hot Heads: What Is the Anger Test and How Does It Work?

TikTok has brought the internet’s attention to something called the Multidimensional Anger Test which measures your “susceptibility to anger,” or your tendency to rage out in different kinds of situations.

The trend has picked up, well… steam on TikTok as loads of folks are learning from the anger test that their ability to manage their emotions in certain circumstances is less than ideal.

If you’re worried that may be you, here’s a look at the anger test and what it entails.

How does the Multidimensional Anger Test work?

In a nutshell, the test is will ask you to rank your level of agreement with certain statements like “Even if I am angry, I try to talk about tense situations with people without letting them know I am angry” or “I get angry when I have to work with incompetent people”.

Your responses will give you a rating in six different areas: Anger Arousal, Anger Spectrum, Hostile Outlook, External Anger and Internal Anger. It will then give you a total score and compare your results with the average person.

The website writes:

Drawing on the work of Dr. Judith M. Siegel, this test maps your experience of anger along multiple empirical dimensions. Analyses of Siegel’s work have found the test to have good psychometric properties in the form of high validity and test-retest reliability. Consequently, the test is frequently used for research purposes and in clinical settings, where it has been shown to be relevant, not just to a person’s anger, but to their physical health and stress responses as well.

While we can’t say how accurate these findings are, we can tell you Dr. Siegel’s study in this space looks at the social and physical consequences of anger and how the different dimensions of anger (like frequency, duration and magnitude) each have a significant impact.

It’s fairly interesting to consider. And if a TikTok trend is highlighting to you that maybe your anger isn’t serving you or your relationships right now, perhaps it’s something you should be spending some time working on. You can take the anger test here, if you’re curious.