Anger Bias Research Articles

Perception of emotional facial expressions in aggression and psychopathy.

Altered affective state recognition is assumed to be a root cause of aggressive behavior, a hallmark of psychopathologies such as psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder. However, the two most influential models make markedly different predictions regarding the underlying mechanism. According to the integrated emotion system theory (IES), aggression reflects impaired processing of social distress cues such as fearful faces. In contrast, the hostile attribution bias (HAB) model explains aggression with a bias to interpret ambiguous expressions as angry. In a set of four experiments, we measured processing of fearful and angry facial expressions (compared to neutral and other expressions) in a sample of 65 male imprisoned violent offenders rated using the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R, Hare, R. D. (1991). The psychopathy checklist-revised. Toronto, ON: Multi-Health Systems) and in 60 age-matched control participants. There was no evidence for a fear deficit in violent offenders or for an association of psychopathy or aggression with impaired processing of fearful faces. Similarly, there was no evidence for a perceptual bias for angry faces linked to psychopathy or aggression. However, using highly ambiguous stimuli and requiring explicit labeling of emotions, violent offenders showed a categorization bias for anger and this anger bias correlated with self-reported trait aggression (but not with psychopathy). These results add to a growing literature casting doubt on the notion that fear processing is impaired in aggressive individuals and in psychopathy and provide support for the idea that aggression is related to a hostile attribution bias that emerges from later cognitive, post-perceptual processing stages.

Racialized emotion recognition accuracy and anger bias of children's faces.

Research suggests that individuals are racially biased when judging the emotions of others (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002) and particularly regarding attributions about the emotion of anger (Halberstadt, Castro, Chu, Lozada, & Sims, 2018; Hugenberg & Bodenhausen, 2003). Systematic, balanced designs are rare, and are comprised of adults viewing adults. The present study expands the questions of racialized emotion recognition accuracy and anger bias to the world of children. Findings that adults demonstrate either less emotion accuracy and/or greater anger bias for Black versus White children could potentially explain some of the large racialized disciplinary discrepancies in schools. To test whether racialized emotion recognition accuracy and anger bias toward children exists, we asked 178 prospective teachers to complete an emotion recognition task comprised of 72 children's facial expressions depicting six emotions and divided equally by race (Black, White) and gender (female, male). We also assessed implicit bias via the child race Implicit Association Test and explicit bias via questionnaire. Multilevel modeling revealed nuanced racialized emotion recognition accuracy with a race by gender interaction, but clear racialized anger bias toward both Black boys and girls. Both Black boys and Black girls were falsely seen as angry more often than White boys and White girls. Higher levels of either implicit or explicit bias did not increase odds of Black children being victim to anger bias, but instead decreased odds that White children would be misperceived as angry. Implications for addressing preexisting biases in teacher preparation programs and by children and parents are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Anger bias in the evaluation of crowds.

People are good at categorizing the emotions of individuals and crowds of faces. People also make mistakes when classifying emotion. When they do so with judgments of individuals, these errors tend to be negatively biased, potentially serving a protective function. For example, a face with a subtle expression is more likely to be categorized as angry than happy. Yet surprisingly little is known about the errors people make when evaluating multiple faces. We found that perceivers were biased to classify faces as angry, especially when evaluating crowds. This amplified bias depended on uncertainty, occurring when categorization was difficult, and it reached peak intensity for crowds with four members. Drift diffusion modeling revealed the mechanisms behind this bias, including an early response component and more efficient processing of anger from crowds with subtle expressions. Our findings introduce bias as an important new dimension for understanding how perceivers make judgments about crowds. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

An eye-tracking study of interpersonal threat sensitivity and adverse childhood experiences in borderline personality disorder

BackgroundPrevious eye-tracking studies provide preliminary evidence for a hypersensitivity to negative, potentially threatening interpersonal cues in borderline personality disorder (BPD). From an etiological point of view, such interpersonal threat hypersensitivity might be explained by a biological vulnerability along with a history of early life adversities. The objective of the current study was to investigate interpersonal threat hypersensitivity and its association with adverse childhood experiences (ACE) in patients with BPD employing eye-tracking technology.MethodsWe examined a sample of 46 unmedicated, adult female patients with BPD and 25 healthy female volunteers, matched on age and intelligence, with a well-established emotion classification paradigm with angry, fearful, happy, and neutral facial expressions. ACE were assessed retrospectively with the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire.ResultsPatients as compared to healthy volunteers reflexively directed their gaze more quickly towards the eyes of emotional and neutral faces and did not adapt their fixation patterns according to the facial expression presented. Misclassifying emotional and neutral faces as angry correlated positively with the patients’ self-reported ACE.ConclusionsBuilding on and extending earlier findings, our results are likely to suggest a visual hypervigilance towards the eyes of emotional and neutral facial expressions and a childhood trauma-related anger bias in patients with BPD. Given the lack of a clinical control group, the question whether these findings are specific for BPD has to remain open. Thus, further research is needed to elucidate the specificity of altered visual attention allocation and the role of ACE in anger recognition in patients with BPD.

Supplemental Material for Anger Bias in the Evaluation of Crowds

Supplemental Material for Anger Bias in the Evaluation of Crowds

Supplemental Material for Racialized Emotion Recognition Accuracy and Anger Bias of Children’s Faces

Supplemental Material for Racialized Emotion Recognition Accuracy and Anger Bias of Children’s Faces

Using Positive Emotion Training With Maltreated Youths to Reduce Anger Bias and Physical Aggression.

Maltreated youths often overinterpret anger in others' emotional expressions, particularly expressions that are ambiguous, and this "anger bias" is associated with aggressive behavior. In the current experiment, we tested the effect of an emotion-training intervention on anger bias and subsequent aggression. Eighty-four youths, ages 8 to 17, who had been removed from home because of maltreatment and had screened positive for aggressive tendencies, served as participants. Over 4 days, youths completed positive emotion training, a computerized program in which youths classify emotional expressions. Youths in the treatment condition received feedback to encourage their recognition of happiness over anger in ambiguous expressions. Physical aggression up to 1 week posttraining was assessed on the basis of self- and staff reports. The intervention was effective in reducing youths' anger bias and somewhat so in reducing aggression-the latter of-which occurred infrequently, limiting power. Results offer direction for developmental research and cost-effective interventions for maltreated youths at risk for aggression and future justice-system involvement.

Attentional Engagement for Pain-Related Information among Individuals with Chronic Pain: The Role of Pain Catastrophizing.

Although the evidence of the attentional bias of chronic pain individuals toward pain-related information is established in the literature, few studies examined the time course of attention toward pain stimuli and the role of pain catastrophizing on attentional engagement toward pain-related information. This study examined the time course of attention to pain-related information and the role of pain catastrophizing on attentional engagement for pain-related information. Participants were fifty young adult participants with chronic pain (35% male, 65% female; M = 21.8 years) who completed self-report questionnaires assessing pain catastrophizing levels (Pain Catastrophizing Scale (PCS)), depression (the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D)), anxiety (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI)), and pain disability (the Pain Disability Index: (PDI)). Attentional engagements to pain- and anger-related information were measured by the eye tracker. Significant interaction effects were found between (1) time and stimulus type for pain-related information (F (5, 245) = 11.55, p < 0.001) and (2) bias scores and pain catastrophizing (F (1, 48) = 6.736, p < 0.05). These results indicated that the degree of increase for pain bias scores were significantly greater than anger bias scores as levels of pain catastrophizing increased. Results of the present study provided the evidence for the attentional bias and information processing model which has clinical implications; high levels of pain catastrophizing may impair individuals' ability to cope with chronic pain by increasing attentional engagement toward pain-related information. The present study can add knowledge to attentional bias and pain research as this study investigated the time course of attention and the role of pain catastrophizing on attentional engagement toward pain-related information for adults with chronic pain conditions.

Preservice teachers’ racialized emotion recognition, anger bias, and hostility attributions

Differential treatment of students by race is well documented, and potentially driven by implicit processes relating to racial prejudice. To better understand some of the pathways by which racial prejudice may be activated, we examined preservice teachers’ racialized perceptions specific to emotion. Forty preservice teachers identified the emotions expressed in 20 Black and White male and female faces in order to assess racialized emotion accuracy and anger bias; participants also judged hostility in videos of 4 Black and White boys’ misbehaviors with peers in school in order to assess racialized attributions. We conducted a series of multilevel models with assessments of Black and White faces (or boys) nested within preservice teachers. Results indicated that emotions in Black faces were less accurately recognized than emotions in White faces; Black faces were more likely to be seen as angry even when they were not, compared to White faces; and boys’ misbehaviors were perceived as more hostile than those of White boys. Together, these results consistently suggest that racialized emotion-related perceptions may enter the classroom with preservice teachers. Implications, as well as limitations that may be resolved in future studies, and extensions of these findings to other minority status populations are discussed.

Emotion Knowledge and Attentional Differences in Preschoolers Showing Context-Inappropriate Anger.

Some children show anger inappropriate for the situation based on the predominant incentives, which is called context-inappropriate anger. Children need to attend to and interpret situational incentives for appropriate emotional responses. We examined associations of context-inappropriate anger with emotion recognition and attention problems in 43 preschoolers (42% male; M age = 55.1 months, SD = 4.1). Parents rated context-inappropriate anger across situations. Teachers rated attention problems using the Child Behavior Checklist-Teacher Report Form. Emotion recognition was ability to recognize emotional faces using the Emotion Matching Test. Anger perception bias was indicated by anger to non-anger situations using an adapted Affect Knowledge Test. 28% of children showed context-inappropriate anger, which correlated with lower emotion recognition (β = -.28) and higher attention problems (β = .36). Higher attention problems correlated with more anger perception bias (β = .32). This cross-sectional, correlational study provides preliminary findings that children with context-inappropriate anger showed more attention problems, which suggests that both "problems" tend to covary and associate with deficits or biases in emotion knowledge.

Seeing enemies? A systematic review of anger bias in the perception of facial expressions among anger-prone and aggressive populations

No systematic research has been conducted to determine whether anger-prone and potentially externalizing, aggressive individuals have anger bias when perceiving facial expressions within neuropsychological paradigms. However, such knowledge is relevant because anger bias may be a cognitive pathway mediating aggression in individuals susceptible to externalizing behavior. This paper therefore aims to clarify whether anger-prone and aggressive populations are emotionally biased toward perceiving others as angry and hostile when processing facial expressions in neuropsychological paradigms. A systematic search of electronic databases and a subsequent manual search identified 15 studies involving 21 experiments (n = 2155). Some type of biased perception pattern was observed in all but one study consisting of one experiment and two studies each consisting of two experiments in which one showed no bias. The biased perception pattern was, however, not restricted to a deficit in selective attention. Rather, it involved a broader bias pattern where anger and hostility were perceived from ambiguous and even unambiguous non-hostile expressions. The present review provides preliminary evidence that anger-prone and aggressive populations are characterized by bias toward perceiving others as angry and hostile when processing facial expressions in a variety of neuropsychological paradigms. Seeing enemies could, indeed, be a cognitive pathway that mediates reactive and instrumental aggression during social interaction among susceptible populations. However, more research is warranted in this unsystematically and poorly investigated area. Language: en

Time-course of attentional bias for threat-related cues in patients with chronic daily headache–tension type: Evidence for the role of anger

This study investigated the role of anger in attentional bias for linguistic threat-related stimuli in individuals with chronic daily headache (CDH) tension type and healthy controls. Attentional bias was assessed using a visual probe task which presented pain-related (sensory and affective), social threat, anger-related, and neutral words at two exposure duration conditions: 500 ms and 1250 ms. Compared to healthy controls, individuals with CDH showed significantly greater attentional bias towards pain-related words at 1250 ms, indicating a bias in maintained attention to pain cues in this group. No significant differences between groups were found in attentional bias scores at the shorter stimulus duration of 500 ms. No significant differences between groups were found in attentional bias scores to social threat and anger-related words at either stimulus presentation duration. When compared to 0, in all group and duration combinations there was significant positive bias towards anger. Across the whole sample, pain bias scores at 1250 ms were significantly associated with anger out, whilst anger bias scores at both 500 ms and 1250 ms correlated significantly with trait anger. The results of the present investigation support the content-specificity hypothesis, according to which attentional bias in patients with chronic pain is shown only towards pain-related cues. Moreover, the current pattern of results highlights the importance of exploring further the role of anger in the aetiology and maintenance of chronic pain in general, and CDH tension type in particular.

Emotion Recognition in Borderline Personality Disorder—A Review of the Literature

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by distinct impairments in emotion regulation, resulting in affective instability especially in the social context. It has been suggested that impaired social cognitive functioning such as impaired facial emotion recognition contributes to the social disturbances in BPD. In accordance with this notion, a number of behavioral studies have revealed a pattern of alterations in facial emotion recognition associated with BPD: subtle impairments in basic emotion recognition, a negativity or anger bias, and a heightened sensitivity to the detection of negative emotions. Furthermore, there is increasing evidence for structural and functional changes in the neural networks underlying affective dysregulation and emotional hyperreactivity in BPD. Merging these lines of evidence, we propose that emotional hyperreactivity interferes with the cognitive processes of facial emotion recognition, thereby contributing to the specific pattern of altered emotion recognition in BPD. Suggestions for future research and clinical implications are discussed.

Anger, shame and guilt in children with externalizing problems: An imbalance of affects?

In two studies, we examined the extent to which children with behaviour problems are characterized by a predominance of anger and a relative absence of the moral emotions of guilt and shame. In the first study, a community sample (N = 48) was used, in the second study a clinical sample (N = 20) was compared to a control group of non-problematic children (N = 20). The results of these studies partially supported the anger-dominance hypothesis. The non-clinical group reported higher frequencies of daily anger and also more anger in response to ambiguous hypothetical situations (Study 1). The clinical group also demonstrated an anger bias. However, they only did so by a more implicit procedure: they added anger elements to their free descriptions of events eliciting negative emotions like fear, sadness, jealousy and shame (Study 2). In both studies, there was a tendency for children with behaviour problems to react with less intense guilt and shame to ambiguous situations.