Anger and threat detection

Abstract

Emotions are known to influence judgments and decision making, even on tasks or in situations unrelated to the original source of the emotional experience (Schwarz & Clore, 2007; Clore, Gasper, & Garvin, 2001). However, despite the wealth of research on incidental emotions (those elicited by a source other than the task at hand), it remains unclear whether such emotion effects extend to purely objective judgments for which there is a clear correct and incorrect response. To test this possibility, we had participants complete an emotion induction procedure and then a threat detection task in which they were shown images of White males holding either neutral everyday objects (e.g., wallets, cameras, cellphones, soda cans) or guns. Participants were asked, under time pressure, to identify whether each individual was holding a gun or a neutral object. In a series of background experiments, we showed that participants induced to experience anger demonstrated a bias on the threat detection task whereby they made more errors claiming that neutral objects were guns than vice versa. Neutral participants did not exhibit any such bias. Importantly, the effect appeared to be emotion-specific, as several other positive and negative emotional states (disgust, happiness, sadness) failed to produce any effect on threat detection performance. We believe that, of these emotions, anger alone produced a bias because it was the only emotion that was relevant to the gun/no-gun decision. That is, anger is an emotion that might typically be elicited in situations involving the potential for violence or aggression, and so the experience of anger could more readily be misattributed to the decision at hand.