ArticleFrontiers in psychology2015
Anger fosters action. Fast responses in a motor task involving approach movements toward angry faces and bodies.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Pupil-mimicry conditions trust in partners: moderation by oxytocin and group membership.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Trial
- Effects of subliminal emotional facial expressions on language comprehension as revealed by event-related brain potentials.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The effects of race, gender, and alcohol cues on anger perception in crowds.Australian journal of psychology · 2025Article
- Additive effects of emotional expression and stimulus size on the perception of genuine and artificial facial expressions: an ERP study.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- "Unpacking" cultural differences in social anxiety between Japanese and European Americans: the roles of threat appraisal and attentional bias.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Attention Towards Pupil Size in Humans and Bonobos (Affective science · 2022Article
- Emotional body postures affect inhibitory control only when task-relevant.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Right Hemisphere Dominance for Unconscious Emotionally Salient Stimuli.Brain sciences · 2021Review
- Gamma Oscillations in the Temporal Pole Reflect the Contribution of Approach and Avoidance Motivational Systems to the Processing of Fear and Anger Words.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Threatening Facial Expressions Impact Goal-Directed Actions Only if Task-Relevant.Brain sciences · 2020Article
- A sensorimotor control framework for understanding emotional communication and regulation.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2020Review
- Article
- Perception of Threatening Intention Modulates Brain Processes to Body Actions: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- Exploring attentional bias towards threatening faces in chimpanzees using the dot probe task.PloS one · 2018Article
- The Weight of Emotions in Decision-Making: How Fearful and Happy Facial Stimuli Modulate Action Readiness of Goal-Directed Actions.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- The dot-probe task to measure emotional attention: A suitable measure in comparative studies?Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2017Review
- Article
- Bonobos (Pan paniscus) show an attentional bias toward conspecifics' emotions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
- Article
- What's in a Face? How Face Gender and Current Affect Influence Perceived Emotion.Frontiers in psychology · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Efficiently responding to others' emotions, especially threatening expressions such as anger and fear, can have great survival value. Previous research has shown that humans have a bias toward threatening stimuli. Most of these studies focused on facial expressions, yet emotions are expressed by the whole body, and not just by the face. Body language contains a direct action component, and activates action preparation areas in the brain more than facial expressions. Hence, biases toward threat may be larger following threatening bodily expressions as compared to facial expressions. The current study investigated reaction times of movements directed toward emotional bodies and faces. For this purpose, a new task was developed where participants were standing in front of a computer screen on which angry, fearful, and neutral faces and bodies were presented which they had to touch as quickly as possible. Results show that participants responded faster to angry than to neutral stimuli, regardless of the source (face or body). No significant difference was observed between fearful and neutral stimuli, demonstrating that the threat bias was not related to the negativity of the stimulus, but likely to the directness of the threat in relation to the observer. Whereas fearful stimuli might signal an environmental threat that requires further exploration before action, angry expressions signal a direct threat to the observer, asking for immediate action. This study provides a novel and implicit method to directly test the speed of actions toward emotions from the whole body.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.