Angry face

There are lots of things that can make you angry. Whether it be the inadequacy of government bureaucracy, your co-worker’s tendency to leave festering Thai meals in the communal fridge, or your partner’s insane refusal to close a cupboard door…you have to communicate your anger in some way. Assuming that you don’t want to go direct to launching some sort of thermo-nuclear warhead you will want to communicate anger in less harmful ways which is where the universally understood angry face comes in and now researchers have found exactly why the angry face works.

The very fact that there is a universal angry face that crosses cultural and historical boundaries tells us that there is something evolutionary and fundamentally biological being communicated by that facial configuration. The elements of that angry face are; lowered brow, lips thinned, lips pushed out, nose flared, chin pushed out and up, mouth raised, and cheekbones raised (as in a snarl). In the new study the researchers found that any one of these elements on its own does not communicate anger but they went a step further.

The researchers took each characteristic of an angry face to see what it communicated to an observer on its own. To do this, for instance, they showed people two computer generated faces; one with a lowered brow and one with a raised brow. The subjects were asked what they thought the difference was between the two faces. This was repeated for each of the components of an angry face and in each case a single trait was being communicated; strength. For each of the elements of the angry face when seen on their own people regarded the face as belonging to a stronger individual than when the element was not there.

So when those seven facial muscle groups involuntarily contract to make the angry face what is being communicated is strength. This means that anger, or at least the angry face, is a way of possibly avoiding actual conflict by letting the object of the anger know just how powerful the angry person is. An angry face is meant to intimidate and it has done probably since the first dispute over who owned which rock and stick some millennia ago.

Now step forward a millennia or so and imagine a world where the angry face has been “de-selected” because intimidation is no longer a preferred life skill, supplanted instead by smiles and sharing. You may say I’m a dreamer…but I’m not the only one.