Anger in Adulthood in Participants Who Lost Their Father During the War in Croatia When They Were in Their Formative Age.

BACKGROUND: Loss of parents in early childhood can have serious long-term psychological consequences. Abandoned by a close figure of attachment, many persons have developed the emotion of anger, even though the separation was caused by death. The traumatic experience of the loss of a parent is particularly hard in war, because most often it does not occur as an individual trauma. Our aim is to research anger as a personality trait in persons whose father had died in war at a time when they were children, and to compare it with an appropriate civilian control group of subjects.

SUBJECTS AND METHODS: The study comprised 155 persons of both sexes. The target group consisted of persons (N=98) whose father had died in the Homeland War and who had just been born at the time of their father's death, or were children or adolescents, and had since their father's death grown up in a single-parent family with their mother, while the control group of subjects (N=57) had not suffered any war losses in the family in the war time from 1991 to 1995. The examined variables were: sex, age, loss of father due to civilian or war causes, marital status, age when the subject lost their father, anger as a state and as a personality trait. STAXI is used in this study; it is frequently used in studies of experiencing, expressing and controlling anger in persons suffering from PTSD.

RESULTS: Statistically significant differences were demonstrated in some of the scales and subscales of anger as a state and anger as a personality trait between the abovementioned subject groups, with higher scores in persons who had suffered a civilian loss of father.

CONCLUSIONS: The study supports the opinion that the social context in which the grieving person is before, during and after the loss of a close person has an important role in the process of grieving, and eventually defines the social and personal meaning of death.