Harriet Lerner's The Dance of Anger and the Anger Facet (N2)
Harriet Lerner's The Dance of Anger sold millions by treating anger as information instead of a problem to stuff down. In a Forbes interview she lays out what the emotion can and cannot do: anger "signals that something is wrong but it doesn't tell us what is wrong or how to approach the problem in a growth-fostering way that leads to lasting change." The feeling is the alarm, not the instructions. In the Big Five, how loudly that alarm rings is one facet.
The volume is the Anger facet
Anger (N2), under Neuroticism, is the readiness to feel irritation and heat when things go wrong. A high scorer flares fast and often; a low scorer stays level through the same provocations. Lerner is not telling you to lower your N2, and that distinction is the whole book, because most anger advice is really just a demand to feel less. Her argument is that N2 sets how much anger shows up, and nothing about what you do with it once it does.
That part runs on other traits. Lerner names the two usual failure modes in the same interview: "Instead we silence our anger, or vent it in a way that leaves us feeling helpless and powerless." Silencing tends to travel with high Agreeableness and the reflex to keep the peace; venting, the hot fight response, tends to travel with low impulse control. Same N2 underneath, opposite exits. The book is essentially a guide to the third door, where the anger gets spent on changing the relationship rather than just discharging into it.
We map anger across the whole model in anger through OCEAN, and the facet on its own in Anger (N2). Lerner's lasting point is that a high score is a working smoke detector, and the skill is learning to read it rather than ripping out the battery.
Read the book: The Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships by Harriet Lerner.
See Where You Fall
Where do you actually fall? The 30-facet OCEAN personality test takes about 15 minutes and scores all five domains and the facets underneath them. Take the test
Research Citations
Lerner, H. (1985). The dance of anger: A woman's guide to changing the patterns of intimate relationships. Harper & Row.
Spielberger, C. D. (1999). State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory-2 (STAXI-2): Professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.
Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89.
Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.