Anger: history and trivia

 Anger is one of the most basic and simple emotions. Plutchik defines anger as the emotional experience of being confronted with an obstacle, while Sheila Videbeck describes anger as a strongly unpleasant and emotional response to a perceived provocation. According to Plutchik, the personality trait that results from anger is aggression. The emotion of anger also has a physical component, such as an increased heart rate, increased blood pressure and a change in adrenaline levels, and

Drawing of two faces expressing anger.

norepinephrine. Outwardly, it is expressed mainly in facial expressions, body language, psychological reactions (e.g. defence mechanisms) and sometimes also in behaviour - aggression. For example, people and animals start to speak louder, try to look physically bigger, show their teeth and stare. All these anger-related behaviours are designed to warn those who are inflicted with anger to stop the behaviour (the defensive role of the emotion). Anger is the emotion that we humans are least good at controlling; dealing with it constructively is a skill that needs to be learned. We usually think of anger as a negative emotion, but this is not always necessarily the case. It is constructive when it helps us to stand up for ourselves, to change an inappropriate attitude or to assert our opinions.

Hinko Smrekar - Anger, from the Seven Deadly Sins series

Expressing and Recognising Anger

Recognising anger as disgust

Various studies have shown that there is a similarity between the facial expressions for anger and those for disgust. Despite the fact that people use different facial muscles when expressing anger than when expressing disgust, mistakes are often made in distinguishing between the two. Widen and Naab (2012) wanted to find out whether facial expressions convey a single emotion or whether the interpretation of facial expressions can also be guided, shaped and thus different to some extent. They found that the recognition of a particular emotion may differ depending on which category of emotion the observer is looking for. Thus, the interpretation of emotions can be partly suggested. In a 2008 study, Aviezer et al. found that misidentification of emotions is influenced by concurrent context and conflicting facial expressions (in cases where study participants observed pictures of a person with a facial expression of disgust in the context of anger, and vice versa, they were most likely to identify anger in the pictures).

This was also found by Noh and Isaacowit (2013), who focused primarily on emotion recognition through facial expressions in different contexts (compliant, inappropriate and neutral) in relation to the difference in age of the observers. They found that the effect of context was more significant in older adults.

In 1985, based on research showing that preschool children from the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea in North America had difficulty distinguishing anger from disgust, Russell et al. wanted to test whether the same was true for educated, literate, English-speaking adults. In three phases of the study, the participating students were asked to identify emotions in specific photographs (of different emotions) in three different ways (in the first phase, they freely identified the emotion, in the second phase, for a set of photographs, they were asked to point to those that expressed anger, and in the third phase, they were asked to quantify the intensity of anger in the photographs). The results showed that in all three phases, participants correctly identified anger, while almost 50% of them also chose the photo of disgust each time.

Pochedly, Widen and Russell (2012) also addressed the misperception of nose wrinkling (which is thought to be a typical expression of disgust) as anger. They concluded that this recognition of an emotion (disgust or anger) is context-dependent - if an observer sees an expression of anger earlier, he or she will label the subsequent frown as disgust.

That's it for today, we'll read it all again in 2 days! Yes, I will have blogmas again. I can't wait! Subscribe to the newsletter so you don't miss it!