Finding the face in the crowd: An anger superiority effect.

Hansen, Christine H.; Hansen, Ranald D.

doi:10.1037/0022-3514.54.6.917

Cited by 1,045 publications

(983 citation statements)

References 43 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

863

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Although we point to the classic literature on preparedness for detecting angry faces as supportive of our evolutionary account (Hansen & Hansen, 1988;Öhman & Dimberg, 1978), developmental experience is crucial for the normal expression of evolved traits (Bates et al, 1998;Frankenhuis & Panchanathan, 2011;Johnson, 2011;Tooby, Cosmides, & Barrett, 2003).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 52%

If looks could kill: Anger attributions are intensified by affordances for doing harm.

Holbrook¹,

Galperin²,

Fessler³

et al. 2014

Emotion

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Emotion perception is necessarily imprecise, leading to possible overperception or underperception of a given emotion extant in a target individual. When the costs of these two types of errors are recurrently asymmetrical, categorization mechanisms can be expected to be biased to commit the less costly error. Contextual factors can influence this asymmetry, resulting in a concomitant increase in biases in the perception of a given emotion. Anger motivates aggression, hence an important contextual factor in anger perception is the capacity of the perceived individual to inflict harm. The greater the capacity to harm, the more costly it is to underestimate the extent to which the target is angry, and therefore the more that perception should be biased in favor of overestimation. Consonant with this prediction, in two studies, U.S. adults perceived greater anger when models were holding household objects having affordances as weapons (e.g., garden shears) than when they were holding objects lacking such affordances (e.g., a watering can) or were empty-handed. Consistent with the unique relationship between anger and aggression, this positive bias did not appear in judgments of other negative emotions.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 52%

If looks could kill: Anger attributions are intensified by affordances for doing harm.

Holbrook¹,

Galperin²,

Fessler³

et al. 2014

Emotion

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Specifically, if young infants typically had positive everyday interactions, then their evaluative neutral point, rather than being equidistant from positive and negative evaluations, would shift closer to positive evaluations; this would 7 Some researchers (e.g., Bohner, Bless, Schwarz, & Strack, 1988;Kellermann, 1984) have attempted to rule this out by manipulating the probability and the negativity of events independently and revealing a negativity bias even when the negative and positive events occurred equally frequently (see also Eastwood, Smilek, & Merikle, 2001;Fox et al, 2000;Hansen & Hansen, 1988;Öhman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001;Pratto & John, 1991). Note, however, that if in our daily lives, we do generally experience more positive than negative outcomes, and negative outcomes do therefore stand out, then when faced with an artificial research situation in which there is an equal or higher probability of negative outcomes, we might nevertheless display a negativity bias (Baumeister et al, 2001;Taylor, 1991).…”

Section: A the Negativity Bias In Attention To Emotionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Vaish¹,

Großmann²,

Woodward³

2008

Psychological Bulletin

919

615

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There is ample empirical evidence for an asymmetry in the way that adults use positive versus negative information to make sense of their world; specifically, across an array of psychological situations and tasks, adults display a negativity bias, or the propensity to attend to, learn from, and use negative information far more than positive information. This bias is argued to serve critical evolutionarily adaptive functions, but its developmental presence and ontogenetic emergence have never seriously been considered. Here, we argue for the existence of the negativity bias in early development, evident especially in research on infant social referencing but also in other developmental domains. We discuss ontogenetic mechanisms underlying the emergence of this bias, and explore not only its evolutionary but also its developmental functions and consequences. Throughout, we suggest ways to further examine the negativity bias in infants and older children, and we make testable predictions that would help clarify the nature of the negativity bias during early development. KeywordsNegativity bias; Affective asymmetry; Social-cognitive development; Emotion; Social referencing Infants are exposed to a great deal of social information from birth, and their ability to use this information effectively is critical for development in many domains and for survival in general. This raises several important questions: do infants attend equally to all facets of this information, or do they attend to certain facets more than others? Do they, in addition, learn and remember particular kinds of information better than others? What evolutionary and developmental consequences do these ways of approaching the environment have? In this paper, we propose that infants display a negativity bias: that is, infants attend more to, are more influenced by, and use to a greater degree negative rather than positive facets of their environment. We propose possible ontogenetic pathways for the emergence of the negativity bias, and we argue that this bias serves important evolutionary and developmental functions.

show abstract

“…Moreover, facial expressions are generally thought to be biologically rooted , comparable across cultures (Ekman et al, 1969), and they clearly evoke emotional responses in everyday life (Dimberg, 1982). Similar to pictures of emotional scenes (e.g., Alpers, 2008), emotional expressions have been shown to capture attention in visual search tasks (Hansen and Hansen, 1988;Öhman et al, 2001) and in the dot-probe deployment paradigm Mogg and Bradley, 2002). Within the framework of the somatic marker hypothesis it has been argued that the perception of an emotional expression involves the simulation of the emotional state within the relevant cortical circuitry of the observer (Adolphs, 2002).…”

Section: Emotional Facial Expressionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Emotional scenes and facial expressions elicit different psychophysiological responses

Alpers

Adolph

Pauli

2011

International Journal of Psychophysiology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We examined if emotional faces elicit physiological responses similar to pictures of emotional scenes. Forty one students viewed emotional scenes (negative, neutral, and positive) and emotional faces (angry, neutral, and happy). Heart rate, orbicularis oculi and electrodermal activity were measured continuously, and the startle reflex was elicited. Although the patterns of valence and arousal ratings were comparable, physiological response patterns differed. For scenes we replicated the valence-specific modulation of the startle response, heart rate deceleration, and the arousal-related modulation of the electrodermal response. In contrast, for faces we found valence-specific modulation only for the electrodermal response, but the startle and heart rate deceleration were modulated by arousal. Although arousal differences may account for some differences in physiological responding this shows that not all emotional material that is decoded similarly leads to the same psychophysiological output.

show abstract

Finding the face in the crowd: An anger superiority effect.

Cited by 1,045 publications

References 43 publications

If looks could kill: Anger attributions are intensified by affordances for doing harm.

If looks could kill: Anger attributions are intensified by affordances for doing harm.

Not all emotions are created equal: The negativity bias in social-emotional development.

Emotional scenes and facial expressions elicit different psychophysiological responses

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About