Exploring the influence of threat, ambiguity, and identity in angry faces

Abstract

The hypothesis that angry faces exert a threat-relevant influence on observers is intuitively and theoretically appealing. The interpretation of findings in support of this hypothesis, however, may be compromised by the possibility that anger is not only more threatening than other affective expressions, such as happiness, but also constitutes a more ambiguous display of facial affect. Chapter 1 of the present work demonstrates this problem on a reaction time task, and discusses the implications of this problem for other experimental tasks designed to evaluate the influence of angry faces. Under conditions that minimize the impact of affect display ambiguity, Chapter 2 provides a demonstration that angry faces do exert an influence consistent with their threat-relevance. Specifically, the findings suggest that the identity of an angry facial expression may make a more salient impression on an observer relative to the identity of a happy facial expression.