Study: Angry Face Makes People Look Stronger

Lowered brow, thinned lips, and flared nostrils—we know an angry face when we see one.

“The expression is cross-culturally universal, and even congenitally blind children make this same face without ever having seen one,” says Aaron Sell, a lecturer at the School of Criminology at Griffith University in Australia and lead author of the study.

The anger expression employs seven distinct muscle groups that contract in a highly stereotyped manner. The researchers wanted to understand why evolution chose those particular muscle contractions to signal the emotional state of anger.

The current research is part of a larger set of studies that examine the evolutionary function of anger.

“Our earlier research showed that anger evolved to motivate effective bargaining behavior during conflicts of interest,” says Sell, formerly a postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Evolutionary Psychology.

The greater the harm an individual can inflict, notes Leda Cosmides, the more bargaining power he or she wields. Cosmides, professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara, is a co-author on the study along with John Tooby, UC Santa Barbara professor of anthropology.

“This general bargaining-through-menace principle applies to humans as well,” says Tooby. “In earlier work we were able to confirm the predictions that stronger men anger more easily, fight more often, feel entitled to more unequal treatment, resolve conflicts more in their own favor, and are even more in favor of military solutions than are physically weak men.”

Starting from the hypothesis that anger is a bargaining emotion, the researchers reasoned that the first step is communicating to the other party that the anger-triggering event is not acceptable, and the conflict will not end until an implicit agreement is reached.

This, they say, is why the emotion of anger has a facial expression associated with it.

“But the anger face not only signals the onset of a conflict,” says Sell. “Any distinctive facial display could do that. We hypothesized that the anger face evolved its specific form because it delivers something more for the expresser: each element is designed to help intimidate others by making the angry individual appear more capable of delivering harm if not appeased.”

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