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

Abstract

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.

Effects of Weapons on Aggressive Thoughts, Angry Feelings, Hostile Appraisals, and Aggressive Behavior: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Weapons Effect Literature

“…For example, some studies have measured primary or automatic appraisals by speed of fist clenching (e.g., da Gloria, Duda, Pahlavan, & Bonnet, 1989) and by speed of identification of weapons versus neutral objects (e.g., De Oca & Black, 2013; Sulikowski & Burke, 2014). Other studies have measured secondary or controlled reappraisal by having participants indicate how disagreeable, hostile, and angry they thought a target person was (e.g., Epstein, 1980; Holbrook et al, 2014). Unfortunately, there were not enough studies to examine primary and secondary appraisals separately.…”

A Preregistered Study of Competing Predictions Suggests That Men Do Overestimate Women’s Sexual Intent

“…People also judge a hill as steeper when they are standing at the top rather than at the bottom (Proffitt, Bhalla, Gossweiler, & Midgett, 1995), and fearful people at the top of a hill judge it to be steeper when they are standing on a skateboard rather than on a wooden box (Stefanucci, Proffitt, Clore, & Parekh, 2008). Similarly, men holding dangerous objects tend to seem angrier than men holding harmless objects (Holbrook et al., 2014). In each case, evolution could have biased only behavior, but instead appears to have biased perceptual judgments.…”

Assets at Risk: Menstrual Cycle Variation in the Envisioned Formidability of a Potential Sexual Assailant Reveals a Component of Threat Assessment

“…Preliminary evidence in support of this prediction comes from a study of perceptions of the target individual′s subjective state. Reasoning along errormanagement lines, Holbrook et al (2014) successfully predicted that participants would judge a target individual holding tools that could be used as weapons to be angrier than a target holding analogous tools that did not offer such affordances, a pattern consonant with the plausible assumption that anger is a determinant of the likelihood of attack.…”