Anger and the Brain, Body, and Decision: Neural and Physiological Effects

Abstract

Anger is an extremely intense feeling with great impacts on neural activity and physiological processes upon the cognitive function, decision-making process, and general health. This paper discusses how anger cues at subliminal levels have effects on lexical decision-making tasks, systolic blood pressure, and activation pattern effects in the brain. Anger primes have also been shown to delay reaction times, increase systolic blood pressure, and activate various areas of the brain involved in attention, visual processing, and arousal. Such effects would lead to capitalizing on action readiness, a cost possibly in terms of reduced cognitive functioning and decision-making quality. A better understanding of how anger works and its health effects allows for improving strategies in emotional regulation that minimize some of the costs associated with this complex feeling.

Emotions influence cognitive processes this way, in how a person perceives, attends to, and responds to their world around them. Anger is one of the most common and intense emotions that may have the capability to influence both adaptive and maladaptive effects. Being an emotion of approach and having negative valence, anger promotes action but, at the same time, diminishes the cognitive function. For instance, anger elicits physiological effects such as increased cardiac activity and blood pressure, preparing the body for action. At the same time, it can impede the cognitive processing and even skew attention, thus compromising decision-making speed. The research in recent times in the domain of cognitive neuroscience suggests that anger is singularly positioned to affect the brain's cognitive control systems, implications of which are broad-ranging concerning both mental and physical health.

Other emotions like fear, happiness, and sadness are thoroughly researched and even categorize well within typical psychological disorders of anxiety and depression. Anger is relatively underresearched because it's so well understood to be an aetiology for health issues such as cardiovascular disease. The purpose of this paper is to examine the subliminal influence of anger on physiological activation, neuronal activity, and cognitive function in

lexical decision-making using neuroimaging. By observing the neural and physiological mechanisms underlying anger-related impacts on decision-making, we intend to emphasise the general consequences of anger for cognitive functioning and health.