[A] Mark Williams and Jason Mattingley, whose study has just been published in Current Biology, looked at the way a person’s sex affects his or her response to emotionally charged facial expressions. People from all cultures agree on what six basic expressions of emotion look like. Whether the face before you is expressing anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness or surprise seems to be recognised universally — which suggests that the expressions involved are innate, rather than learned.
[B] Moreover, most participants could find an angry face just as quickly when it was mixed in a group of eight photographs as when it was part of a group of four. That was in stark contrast to the other five sorts of expression, which took more time to find when they had to be sorted from a larger group. This suggests that something in the brain is attuned to picking out angry .expressions, and that it is especially concerned about angry men. Also, this highly tuned ability seems more important to males than females, since the two researchers found that men-picked out the angry expressions faster than women did, even though women were usually quicker than men to recognized every other sort of facial expression.
[C] Dr Williams and Dr Mattingley showed the participants in their study photographs of these emotional expressions in mixed sets of either four or eight. They asked the participants to look for a particular sort of expression, and measured the amount of time it took them to find it. The researchers found, in agreement with previous studies, that both men and women identified angry expressions most quickly. But they also found that anger was more quickly identified on a male face than a female one.
[D] Men are notoriously insensitive to the emotional world around them. At least, that is the stereotype peddled by a thousand women’s magazines. And a study by two researchers at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, confirms that men are, indeed, less sensitive to emotion than women, with one important exception. Men are acutely sensitive to the anger of other men.
[E] Dr Williams and Dr Mattingley suspect the reason for this is that being able to spot an angry individual quickly has a survival advantage — and, since anger is more likely to turn into lethal violence in men than in women, the ability to spot angry males quickly is particularly valuable.
[F] The ability to spot quickly that an alpha male is in a foul mood would thus have great survival value. It would allow the sharp-witted time to choose appeasement, defence or possibly even pre-emptive attack. And, if it is right, this study also confirms a lesson learned by generations of bar-room tough guys and schoolyard bullies: if you want attention, get angry.
[G] As to why men are more sensitive to anger than women, it is presumably because they are far more likely to get killed by it. Most murders involve men killing other men — even today the context of homicide is usually a spontaneous dispute over status or sex.
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