Responding to Social Signals for Response Inhibition: A Psychological Process Underlying Trait Anger

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 effec-tively 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 find-ings could not be explained in terms of more general tendencies toward aggression or impulsivity or through perceptual processes. Keywords anger, aggression, inhibition, facial expressions Imagine that after you make a suggestion to another person, their facial expression immediately turns angry. Do you with-draw your suggestion or continue advocating for it with full determination? In his social response reversal theory, Blair (2003, 2004) argues that this situation reflects an important psychological process underlying individual differences in anger and aggression. According to this theory, angry expres-sions serve as a signal of social correction, indicating that one person disapproves of another’s behavior and wants them to desist (cf. Fridlund, 1994). If an individual inhibits their beha-vior in response to such signals, they can preemptively stop the escalation of anger and aggression. By contrast, individuals who are not responsive to these signals may allow minor dis-agreements to spiral into angry and aggressive conflicts. The purpose of the current investigations is to test a prediction from this theory, namely that trait anger would be related to the speed of response-inhibition processes for angry expressions