Anger is one of the emotions most easily recognised in human facial expressions. However, not everyone perceives this emotion in the same way. A study suggests that individual characteristics are associated with how people recognise and process signs of anger in others.
Happiness, sadness, disgust, surprise, fear, contempt, and anger. These are the basic emotions traditionally associated with facial expressions described as universal. As important social signals, facial expressions help us rapidly interpret the emotions and intentions of others. Among these emotions, anger holds a particularly relevant role because it often signals interpersonal threat or conflict.
Although anger is one of the emotions most readily recognised in human faces, relatively little is known about how anger-related signals are processed under different perceptual conditions and how such processing may vary between individuals. Given its relevance to mental and cardiovascular health, interpersonal relationships, and adaptation to the social environment, understanding the mechanisms underlying anger perception and regulation remains a major challenge for contemporary research.
In this context, with the support of the Bial Foundation, Liliana Capitão led a study conducted at the Centre for Research in Psychology at the University of Minho, investigating whether individual differences in anger management are associated with not only the ability to recognise emotions in others but also the speed at which emotional signals reach conscious awareness.
The study involved 60 healthy adults who completed two emotional processing tasks. One assessed their ability to consciously recognise facial expressions, while the other measured how long different facial expressions took to become visible after initially being suppressed by competing visual stimuli. Different styles of anger expression were also assessed, including the tendency to express anger outwardly or to suppress it.
The findings were reported in the article "The anger you see and the anger you don't: awareness and expression styles in facial emotion processing" , published in the scientific journal Cognition and Emotion, and revealed a distinct pattern depending on the task. When participants viewed visible faces and were asked to identify the expressed emotion, angry faces were recognised more accurately than fearful faces. However, when facial expressions were initially concealed by competing visual stimuli, fearful faces reached conscious awareness more rapidly than angry faces.
Individual differences also proved to be relevant. Participants with a stronger tendency to externalise anger identified angry expressions more accurately than fearful expressions. In contrast, those who tended to suppress anger took longer to become aware of angry faces than of fearful or neutral faces when the facial expressions were initially masked by other visual stimuli.
"We concluded that anger signals are not processed uniformly", says Liliana Capitão, adding that "the way each person manages anger is associated with how they perceive it in others". The findings highlight the importance of considering emotions from a multidimensional perspective and incorporating individual differences into models that seek to explain anger perception and regulation, as the relationship between individual emotional characteristics and cognitive processing may vary depending on the specific emotion involved.
