Emotional Intractability 1 RUNNING HEAD: EMOTIONAL INTRACTABILITY Emotional Intractability: Gender, Anger, Aggression and Rumination in Conflict

Purpose – The purpose of this article is to investigate how people’s gender role identities (self-identified masculinity and femininity) affect their perceptions of the emotional role of the humiliated victim in conflicts (and the norms surrounding the role), and how these perceptions affect the negativity and aggressiveness of their responses and the degree to which they ruminate over conflict and remain hostile over time. Design/methodology/approach – This paper builds on literature on humiliation, aggression, gender, and rumination and presents a correlational scenario study with 96 male graduate students from a large Northeastern University. Findings- Males with high masculine gender-role identities were more likely to perceive the social norms surrounding a humiliating conflictual encounter as privileging aggression, and to report intentions to act accordingly, than males with high feminine gender role identities. Furthermore, participants were more likely to ruminate about the conflict, and therefore maintain their anger and aggressive intentions a week later, when they perceived the situation to privilege aggression