Why do we perceive anger differently?

Anger is among the emotions most easily recognised in human facial expressions. An angry face can quickly influence how we interpret a social situation. But do we process signs of anger in the same way under all circumstances? And could the way each person expresses or suppresses their anger influence how they recognise emotional expressions in other people’s faces?

To address these questions, the team led by Liliana Capitão conducted a study involving 60 healthy adults. Participants 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 being initially concealed by competing visual stimuli. The researchers also assessed different anger expression styles, including the tendency to express anger outwardly or suppress it.

The results revealed a distinct pattern depending on the task. When participants viewed visible faces and were asked to identify the emotion being expressed, angry faces were recognised more accurately than fearful faces. However, when facial expressions were initially concealed by other visual stimuli, fearful faces became visible more quickly than angry faces.

The study also showed that individual differences matter. People with a greater tendency to express anger outwardly were more accurate at recognising angry expressions than fearful expressions. In contrast, people with a greater tendency to repress or hold in their anger became aware of angry expressions more slowly than fearful or neutral expressions. In other words, habitual ways of managing anger appear to influence how emotional signals are processed.

The researchers conclude that signs of anger are not processed uniformly. Although angry faces are more easily identified, they are not necessarily the first to become perceptible when visual perception is challenged. Moreover, individual styles of anger expression and regulation appear to shape these processes.

The study 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, was developed within the framework of project 277/22 – Anger in the mind and body: From unconscious cognitive mechanisms to psychophysiological and neural substrates, supported by the Bial Foundation.

ABSTRACT

Anger signals interpersonal threat, yet little is known about how anger-related cues are processed under different task demands or how this relates to individual differences in anger expression. This study examined associations between subjective anger – across trait and anger-expression dimensions – and performance on tasks assessing conscious emotion recognition and breakthrough to visual awareness under interocular suppression. Sixty participants completed the Facial Expression Recognition Task (FERT) and a Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) paradigm, alongside the State–Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI). At the group level, results revealed a dissociation between tasks: angry faces were recognised more accurately than fearful faces in the FERT, whereas angry faces were slower to enter visual awareness than fearful faces under CFS. At the level of individual differences, externalised anger was associated with higher accuracy in recognising angry facial expressions relative to fear, whereas internalised anger was associated with relatively slower access to awareness of angry faces compared with fearful and neutral faces under suppression. These findings suggest that internalised and externalised anger-expression tendencies are differentially associated with performance on tasks measuring conscious recognition and breakthrough to visual awareness under suppression, underscoring the need for frameworks that integrate task demands with individual differences in anger regulation.