The anger you see and the anger you don't: awareness and expression styles in facial emotion processing

Anger signals interpersonal threat, yet little is known about how anger-related cues are processed under different task demands or how this relates to individual differences in anger expression. This study examined associations between subjective anger - across trait and anger-expression dimensions - and performance on tasks assessing conscious emotion recognition and breakthrough to visual awareness under interocular suppression. Sixty participants completed the Facial Expression Recognition Task (FERT) and a Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) paradigm, alongside the State-Trait Anger Expression Inventory (STAXI). At the group level, results revealed a dissociation between tasks: angry faces were recognised more accurately than fearful faces in the FERT, whereas angry faces were slower to enter visual awareness than fearful faces under CFS. At the level of individual differences, externalised anger was associated with higher accuracy in recognising angry facial expressions relative to fear, whereas internalised anger was associated with relatively slower access to awareness of angry faces compared with fearful and neutral faces under suppression. These findings suggest that internalised and externalised anger-expression tendencies are differentially associated with performance on tasks measuring conscious recognition and breakthrough to visual awareness under suppression, underscoring the need for frameworks that integrate task demands with individual differences in anger regulation.