Anger describes the readiness to experience irritability, frustration, and hostility — the speed and intensity with which angry affect is triggered and the difficulty of letting it go. High scorers have a low threshold for frustration; they become annoyed readily, hold onto grievances longer than most, and find the presence of provocation difficult to let pass without response. Low scorers are relatively slow to anger, recover from frustrations quickly, and experience fewer situations as genuinely provocative.
The NEO-PI-R called this facet Angry Hostility. The NEO-PI-3's Anger is the same construct with a simpler label.
Cluster membership
Anger belongs to the hostile-impulsive cluster of Neuroticism facets, alongside Immoderation (N5) and Vulnerability (N6). The hostile-impulsive cluster captures the outward-facing or dysregulatory expressions of Neuroticism — anger, impulse failure, and acute stress breakdown — as distinct from the inward-facing anxious-depressive cluster.
How Anger differs from adjacent facets
The distinction from low Agreeableness is the most important cross-domain clarification this page can offer. Low Agreeableness — specifically low Cooperation (A4) — describes willingness to engage in conflict, assert one's own position, and resist accommodation. It is dispositional and relatively unemotional: a person low in Cooperation chooses to confront rather than yield, but not necessarily from a state of anger. N2 Anger is an emotional experience: the felt state of irritability, hostility, and frustration. These can co-occur (an angry, confrontational person) or dissociate: a person high in Anger and high in Cooperation experiences anger internally but yields in conflicts anyway, suppressing the expression. A person low in Anger and low in Cooperation asserts themselves in conflicts without emotional activation — matter-of-fact rather than heated.
The distinction from Immoderation (N5) is one of content: Anger is specifically the hostile emotional experience; Immoderation is the failure to regulate any urge or impulse. Anger and Immoderation often co-occur — frustrated people who cannot regulate their impulses express that anger destructively — but they are separable. A person high in Anger and moderate in Immoderation experiences frequent hostile affect without necessarily acting on it.
What Anger specifically predicts
Anger predicts interpersonal conflict frequency, relationship instability, and the hostile attribution bias — the tendency to interpret ambiguous behavior as intentionally provocative. It also carries documented health associations: trait hostility and anger expression are among the better-established personality correlates of cardiovascular risk, operating through both physiological pathways (chronic sympathetic activation) and behavioral ones (anger-motivated health risk behaviors).
In occupational contexts, Anger predicts lower peer and supervisor ratings of interpersonal effectiveness and higher rates of counterproductive work behavior — particularly the interpersonally directed varieties such as rudeness, confrontation, and retaliation. At moderate levels, the frustration reactivity that Anger represents can signal conscientiousness about quality and standards; at high levels, it becomes a consistent source of friction.
For the broader Neuroticism context, see the Neuroticism dimension page.