It is amazing how your emotions can affect the way the world
looks to you. If you wake up one morning
happy, then even a small dose of bad news may be felt as an opportunity rather
than a failure. When you’re sad, that
same bit of bad news can lead you to feel as though the world is coming to an
end.
What about anger?
What does that do?
An interesting paper by Jolie Baumann and David DeSteno in
the October, 2010 issue of the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology suggests that anger may increase your
perception that the world is threatening.
The design of the studies in this paper is
straightforward. In the basic task, you
see a picture of a man flashed quickly (for about 3/4 of a second). The man is either holding a gun that is
pointed at you or some non-threatening object (like a wallet of
flashlight). Your job is to press one
button if you think he is holding a gun and a second button if you think he is
holding some other object.
Before doing this procedure, people either wrote a brief
essay about their daily routine (which did not affect their emotion much),
about an event that made them happy (which made them happy), or an event that
made them angry (which made them angry).
The main finding from this study was that when people were
angry, they were much more likely to say that a person was carrying a gun when
they weren’t than either the happy people or the group that wrote about their
routine. Using a mathematical technique
called signal detection analysis, the
researchers showed that anger affected the way people made the decision to say
that something was a gun. Basically,
angry people needed less evidence that something might be a gun to say that
they saw a gun than the people in the other groups. A second study showed that this effect was
specific to anger, and did not occur for people who were made to feel disgusted
or sad.
Why does this happen?
The researchers suggested that anger may influence your
belief about how likely it is that things in the world are threatening. The idea is that if you think the world is
more threatening, you might see more threats in your environment than there
really are.
They tested this explanation with a clever study. Again, they had one group who wrote about
their daily routine while a second group wrote about something that made them
angry. Then, they told people that they
would see a picture flashed really briefly on the screen. They were told that, even though the image
was flashed too quickly to know for sure what they saw, they should say whether
they saw a gun or some other object. In
reality, the pixels in the area around the person’s hand were modified so that
there was no clear object shown when the picture was flashed. As a result, this test becomes a measure of
how likely it is that people think there is a gun in the pictures. The people who were angry responded that they
saw a gun on more trials of the study than the people who were not angry.
That is, the angry people thought the world was a more
threatening place.
Finally, the last study in this paper suggests that the
effect of anger is mostly on people’s snap judgments. In a final study, people did the same gun
detection task. After they made their
first response about whether they saw a gun or an object, they were encouraged
to think about it more and to change their mind if they thought their first
judgment had been a mistake. These
second guesses were very accurate.
Putting all of this together, anger seems to affect people’s
snap judgments by making them feel that the world is more threatening. Slower and more deliberate judgments are not
as strongly affected by being angry.
Unfortunately, when you are angry, you often act on the
basis of your initial judgments. If you
are in a situation that is potentially dangerous, then you have no choice but
to act on your initial impression. But
if the situation is not a matter of life or death, then these results suggest
that you should really slow down and think when you’re angry.
Many of us have experienced the situation where we are
already angry and then a comment by a partner, family member, friend, or
coworker sets us off. We respond more
angrily or harshly to this person than we should. Part of what is happening is that this
initial judgment has made the person’s remark feel more threatening than it
really was. In these cases, it is better
to slow down and think before responding.
