Original ArticleThe human anger face evolved to enhance cues of strength
Section snippets
Theoretical background
An animal's fitness is crucially dependent on the outcomes of conflicts of interest. Accordingly, selection should have organized behavioral systems in animals that bargain for improved outcomes in these conflicts. In particular, aggression is a type of bargaining behavior that deploys the threat or actuality of cost-infliction as a tool to incentivize others to reduce their resistance to the aggressor's realization of its interests (Huntingford & Turner, 1987). In humans, these tactics are
Experiment 1: do the components of the anger face increase perceived strength?
To test whether each feature that constitutes the anger expression increases perceived strength, we used a program calibrated with a large number of statistical composites of real faces to generate seven pairs of faces. Each pair contrasted a single feature of the face as modified by anger (e.g. lowered brow) with the opposite modification (e.g. raised brow). Raters then chose the stronger of the pair to determine the effect of each component of the anger face.
Experiment 2: do the components of the anger face increase perceived maturity?
There is another theory, put forward by Marsh, Adams, and Kleck (2005), that argues that the anger face evolved to enhance the maturity of the face, distinguishing it from immature, neotenous faces, i.e. “the origins of the appearances of anger and fear facial expressions…might lie in the expression's resemblance to, respectively, mature and babyish faces.” This position predicts that the constituent parts of the anger face should each—independently— increase the perceived age of the face.
Experiment 3: do the components of the anger face increase perceived maturity or strength in older faces?
The fact that four out of seven of the constituent features of the anger face increased perceived age could be due to the positive relationship that exists between fighting ability and age at young ages. In other words, because male strength peaks in the 20s (Walker, Hill, Kaplan, & McMillan, 2002) and fighting ability near 30 (von Rueden, Gurven, & Kaplan, 2008), making a young face look stronger may lead to the inference that the target is older. In order to decouple increasing age from
General discussion
Taken together, these experiments show that the constellation of features that comprise the anger face was selected for over evolutionary time to enhance cues of physical strength during agonistic bargaining. These results are consistent with previous literature showing that several of the components of the anger face are more prominent in males—the sex that shows evidence of combat design (Becker, Kenrick, Neuberg, Blackwell, & Smith, 2007; see Sell, Hone, & Pound, 2012 for evidence of combat
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2022, Evolution and Human BehaviorCitation Excerpt :Subjects were given a link to a Qualtrics survey that presented only three of the eight vignettes in randomized order to avoid subject fatigue. Vignettes were written to describe typical anger-based aggression because of the important role that formidability assessment plays in anger (see Sell, 2011; Sell et al., 2014; Sell & Lopez, 2020) particularly for young men (Hilton, Harris, & Rice, 2000). In all cases, the vignettes described dyadic fights between two males that followed the usual pattern of male assaults with a disagreement or insult followed by challenge and an implicit mutual agreement to use violence (see Felson, 1982; Luckenbill, 1977, Sell, 2011).