Reacting to Emotion: Anger Arrests and Happiness Helps

Using a new method of affect priming, we find that a face with an angry expression slows a participant's performance; that is, we find anger inferiority. Our task presents a participant with a sequence of 2 visual stimuli. The first stimulus (Sl) and the second stimulus (S2) represent anger or happiness. The S1 s were words, schematic faces, or gray-scale faces, and the S2s were gray-scale faces. Participants performed an affect congruency task, judging whether S1 and S2 represent the same emotion. With standard affective priming, using identical stimulus param- eters, superior performance is found when S1 and S2 represent the same affect. With our task, comparing the 2 stimuli results in anger inferiority. With both congruent and incongruent S1 and S2 the response times depend more strongly on the affect of S1 rather than that of S2. An angry S1 produced longer decision times and more errors than a happy S1.