A “dark side”; of communication avoidance: Indirect interpersonal aggressiveness

Although our understanding of direct forms of verbal aggressiveness has been greatly advanced over the past decade, indirect interpersonal aggressiveness has remained relatively understudied. In the present study, items designed to tap indirect forms of interpersonal aggressiveness were written, administered to participants, factor analyzed along with verbal aggressiveness items, and correlated with a criterion measure. Results produced an internally consistent set of item which: (1) loaded on a separate factor from verbal aggressiveness items, (2) contributed unique variance over that accounted for by verbal aggressiveness in the prediction of psychoticism, a theoretically appropriate criterion variable for validating aggression measures, and (3) loaded on the same factor with verbal aggressiveness and psychoticism when second‐order factor analysis was conducted.