The Anatomy of Anger: An Integrative Cognitive Model of Trait Anger and Reactive Aggression

When Aggressive Individuals See the World More Accurately

Previous research has suggested that aggressive individuals exhibit a bias to perceive nonangry expressions as angry. Another line of thinking, however, posits that aggression is a learned response to hostile environments and should be linked to social-cognitive skills suited to such environments. If so, aggressive individuals may exhibit greater perceptual sensitivity to subtle facial cues of anger. Three studies were conducted to test this proposal. In them, participants’ ability to discriminate between subtly different intensities of facial anger was tested. Aggressive participants generally displayed greater perceptual sensitivity to subtle cues of facial anger. This pattern could not be explained in terms of response bias and was specific to angry expressions. The results thus support the idea that aggression is associated with social-cognitive skills rather than bias and ineptitude.

Personality processes: mechanisms by which personality traits "get outside the skin"

It is time to better understand why personality traits predict consequential outcomes, which calls for a closer look at personality processes. Personality processes are mechanisms that unfold over time to produce the effects of personality traits. They include reactive and instrumental processes that moderate or mediate the association between traits and outcomes. These mechanisms are illustrated here by a selection of studies of traits representing the three broad domains of personality and temperament: negative emotionality, positive emotionality, and constraint. Personality processes are studied over the short term, as in event-sampling studies, and over the long term, as in lifespan research. Implications of findings from the study of processes are considered for resolving issues in models of personality structure, improving and extending methods of personality assessment, and identifying targets for personality interventions.

Responding to Social Signals for Response Inhibition

Angry facial expressions are thought to serve as signals of social correction, indicating that one person disapproves of another’s behavior and wants them to desist. If individuals respond to such signals by inhibiting disapproved-of behaviors, they should effectively reduce the prevalence of angry and aggressive encounters in their lives. Two studies tested this idea by incorporating angry and neutral expressions within a task which measures behavioral-inhibition processes. Consistent with predictions, trait anger was related to response-inhibition processes for angry but not neutral expressions; such that low trait anger individuals exhibited faster response-inhibition processes in the angry context. This effect occurred when participants were explicitly instructed to inhibit behavior in response to facial expressions (Study 1) and when expressions were presented incidentally (Study 2). The findings could not be explained in terms of more general tendencies toward aggression or impulsivity or through perceptual processes.