Emotion and Threat Detection: The Roles of Affect and Conceptual Knowledge

Prior research has demonstrated that angry participants exhibit biased threat detection whereby they are more likely to misidentify neutral objects as guns. Yet, it is unclear whether independent components of anger, such as conceptual knowledge about anger or the affective features of an anger instance, could lead to altered bias alone. Consistent with constructionist theories of emotion, the present set of two experiments demonstrates that threat-detection bias only differs significantly between participants in an emergent-anger condition, who had engaged both components of anger (i.e., conceptual knowledge of anger and negative, high arousal affect), and participants in a control condition, who had engaged neither. Study 2 demonstrates that this pattern of findings also extends to another threat-relevant emotional state (i.e., fear). Implications for studying anger and fear, and emotions more generally, as constructed mental experiences are discussed.

Automated summary

Research has shown that participants in an emergent-anger state exhibit significant differences in threat detection bias, involving both conceptual knowledge and emotional features of anger. This pattern also applies to other threat-relevant emotional states, such as fear.