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Study Finds Anger is Healthier Than Fear
By: Jonathan Potts
He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty...
Well, maybe being slow-to-anger isn’t all that King Solomon made it out to be.
A provocative new study by Jennifer Lerner in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences (SDS) suggests that anger may be a healthier response than fear in situations in which anger is justified. Lerner’s study, published this past November in the journal Biological Psychiatry, found that people who respond to stressful situations with angry facial expressions, rather than fearful expressions, are less likely to suffer such ill effects of stress as high blood pressure and high stress hormone secretion.
Darwin first proposed that facial expressions of emotion signal biological responses to challenges and opportunities. More than a century later, a number of scientists have taken up Darwin’s hypothesis. One important, but unexamined, question concerned the biological significance of facial responses to stressful circumstances. Because stress responses are central to survival, stressful situations should be likely to reveal coordinated biological reactions and facial communication, in part to warn or warn off others.
“Analyses of facial expressions revealed that the more fear individuals displayed in response to the stressors, the higher their biological responses to stress. By contrast, the more anger and indignation individuals displayed in response to the same stressors, the lower their responses,” said Lerner, the Estella Loomis McCandless Associate Professor of Psychology and Decision Science at Carnegie Mellon.
The paper was co-authored by Roxana M. Gonzalez, an SDS doctoral student; Shelley E. Taylor, a professor of psychology at UCLA; and Ronald E. Dahl and Ahmad R. Hariri, affective neuroscientists at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
Their paper challenges two long-held assumptions: one, that stress elicits undifferentiated negative emotions and as a consequence produces a uniform biological response; and two, that all negative emotions, such as fear and anger, provoke the same psychological and biological reactions. This paper builds on a line of work led by Lerner showing that anger triggers feelings of certainty and control as well as optimistic perceptions of risk.(Continued …)