toledoblade.com --

This is your only chance to pick up your prescription and, with minutes to spare before your kids’ day care closes, you find yourself at the end of a slowly moving line.

Finally, after half of your hair has turned gray during the decades-long wait, the woman in front of you shuffles to the register. She turns her battered purse upside down onto the counter. Coins clatter to the floor and roll everywhere. You and other customers race around to help her retrieve her riches. You look at your watch. You’re late. You hope your kids are OK.

The lady in front of you begins counting her pool of change to pay for her purchase. When she is nearly finished, her cell phone rings. She answers it. When she returns to the task at hand, she’s lost count.

She’s starting over.

With the pennies.

At this moment in your pretend life, does the cashier look up at you and see a jaws-clenched, murderous, eyes-blazing stare? Or does she see wide-eyed fear as you worry about your kids?

If she sees anger, you’re lucky. If it’s fear she sees, you’re already paying a physical price for your emotional disturbance, said Jennifer S. Lerner, the Carnegie Mellon University researcher who led a study published this month in the journal Biological Psychiatry that analyzed the health effects of emotions like anger and fear.

“This, to me, is truly the most exciting study that we’ve had,’’ said Ms. Lerner, who looks at the impact of emotions on decision making.
To learn the physiological response to fear and anger, Ms. Lerner and colleagues created an utterly nerve-wracking experimental challenge.

Ninety-two test subjects each completed three exercises that required them to first count backwards by sevens from 9,095, then perform math problems without help of pen or paper, and finally count backwards by 13s from 6,233. As the subjects struggled through each difficult task, a hectoring monitor nagged them to go faster and pointed out every mistake. Before the tests began, subjects were told, “It is important that you do well,” because, they were told, the tests were an accurate indicator of intelligence.

While this was going on, the subjects were monitored for blood pressure, pulse rate, and stress hormone levels while a video camera recorded their every grimace and glare.

Investigators found that people who made fearful faces during the stress tests also experienced an increase in harmful stress hormone levels. Fearful people had higher pulse rates and higher blood pressure.

Yet those who had angry expressions showed lower blood pressure, lower stress hormone levels, and lower pulse rates than fear-faced subjects, suggesting that anger may be good for you - or at least better than fear.

"Righteous anger has a place in protecting against stress,'' said Shelley E. Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, one of the study authors.

That's not to say out-of-control anger and explosive rage carry similar benefits. In fact, such impulsive emotional expression is linked to higher levels of heart disease in numerous previous studies.

So, is the guy sitting next to you suffering any damaging health consequences from fear as your boss dresses him down in front of everyone? Look at his face. Facial expression turned out to be an accurate reflection of emotional state - even better than what anyone says about how they feel, Ms. Lerner said. In her research, angry expressions coincided with the physiological signs of anger, and a fearful expression meant blood pressure was going up.

Previous research shows that Americans are especially inclined toward anger, with some of us experiencing it many times a day or week.

The results of this anger can be far-reaching, Ms. Lerner's research suggests, affecting how we make decisions, how we judge others, how we assess our own abilities, and how likely we are to get angry again.

As you might suspect, anything as popular as anger has an upside. Ms. Lerner's previous research revealed that angry people are more optimistic. In one study, Ms. Lerner and colleagues instructed one group of research subjects to write a short description of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center in a manner that would evoke fear. A second group were told to write about the same event in a way that would instill anger in readers.

Those who were primed to feel anger made more optimistic predictions about the future risk of terrorist attacks. Those who had to write about sadness predicted a far higher likelihood of being hurt in a terror attack.

The angry person's optimism extended beyond notions of terrorist threats. Angry people also predicted themselves less likely to catch the flu than those primed with a fear-inducing writing exercise.

"You're getting angry - but you're feeling good about it,'' Ms. Lerner said recently before an audience attending the New Horizon's Science Briefing in Pittsburgh.

People who are angry "perceive the world as more predictable, and more under individual control," Ms. Lerner said. And as unpleasant as it is to be a victim of anger, people generally see anger as a more positive emotion than fear.

"You are ascribed more power when you put on an angry face,'' Ms. Lerner said.

While anger makes us upbeat about our future, it also makes us more likely to judge others harshly. Research subjects induced to feel anger were asked to evaluate fictional legal claims. The angry people meted out the harshest judgment, even though the fictional defendants had no relationship to the cause of their anger.

Angry and judgmental

And the optimism of anger is a pretty self-involved affair, Ms. Lerner concludes in a comprehensive look at anger called "Portrait of the Angry Decision Maker," to be published in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making.

Angry people will predict that bad things will happen, Ms. Lerner writes. But they mean bad things will happen to you. They see themselves as prevailing "regardless of what happens."

People provoked to feel anger in experimental settings were more judgmental and less trusting of co-workers and acquaintances, even though the co-workers had nothing to do with the cause of anger.

Ms. Lerner reports that angry people's optimism may lead them to more risk-seeking behavior. Their perceptions aren't always accurate. For instance, chronically angry people have a higher incidence of heart disease, divorce, and work problems, yet "angry people rate themselves as significantly less likely than the average person to experience these problems.''

It gets worse.

Studies show angry people are less likely to make thoughtful judgments and consider alternative solutions. They're more prone to stereotyping, and more likely to judge an argument, not on the weight of its merits, but on superficial qualities of the speaker.

Yet, there's a certain charge people get out of anger, Ms. Lerner's work suggests.

Angry people get a kick out of the optimism and sense of control, and enjoy anticipation of vengeance on the people they blame for their troubles. People report they feel "more energized" and stronger when they're angry.

"Anger may be especially exhilarating when anticipating revenge,'' Ms. Lerner writes. And there could be a reason: the brain structure that processes pleasure also processes such anticipation.

"Perhaps like heroin and other addictive substances, anger may be rewarding in the anticipation and experiential stages but harmful in the long run," she writes.

"The 'rush' and optimism of anger may lead people to make unwise choices in which they lose sight of their abilities, their interdependence on others, social norms, and other goals. Thus, the positive aspects of anger could lay the ground work for some of its very negative consequences such as violence and aggression."

Contact Jenni Laidman at: jenni@theblade.com or 419-724-6507.

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