Reacting to Emotion: Anger Arrests and Happiness Helps

Using a new method of affect priming, we find that a face with an angry expression slows a participant's performance; that is, we find anger inferiority. Our task presents a participant with a sequence of 2 visual stimuli. The first stimulus (S1) and the second stimulus (S2) represent anger or...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The American journal of psychology 2016-12, Vol.129 (4), p.363-380
Main Authors: Purcell, Dean G., Stewart, Alan L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adolescent
Adult
affect priming
Affective priming
Anger
Anger - physiology
anger inferiority
Cues
emotion
Emotion regulation
Emotional expression
Emotions
Error rates
Experimentation
Face
face perception
Facial Expression
Facial expressions
Female
Happiness
Humans
Identity
Inferiority
Inferiority complex
Judgment
Male
Mental stimulation
Parameters
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Photic Stimulation - methods
Priming
Psychological research
Psychology
Psychomotor Performance - physiology
Reaction time
Reaction Time - physiology
Social Sciences
Statistical significance
Stimulus
Trials
Visual stimuli
Young Adult
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Summary:Using a new method of affect priming, we find that a face with an angry expression slows a participant's performance; that is, we find anger inferiority. Our task presents a participant with a sequence of 2 visual stimuli. The first stimulus (S1) and the second stimulus (S2) represent anger or happiness. The S1s were words, schematic faces, or gray-scale faces, and the S2s were gray-scale faces. Participants performed an affect congruency task, judging whether S1 and S2 represent the same emotion. With standard affective priming, using identical stimulus parameters, superior performance is found when S1 and S2 represent the same affect. With our task, comparing the 2 stimuli results in anger inferiority. With both congruent and incongruent S1 and S2 the response times depend more strongly on the affect of S1 rather than that of S2. An angry S1 produced longer decision times and more errors than a happy S1.
ISSN:0002-9556
1939-8298
DOI:10.5406/amerjpsyc.129.4.0363