State and Trait Anger, Fear, and Social Information Processing

Emotions include a configuration of facial muscles, an arousal of physiological functions, and a facilitation of particular attention and information processing patterns (Izard, 1991). This chapter focuses on how anger influences attention and information processing. We will see that the most reliable effects of anger’s influence on attention and information processing occur in anger-, hostile-, or aggression-prone individuals who are in an angry state. This trait–state interaction likely occurs because anger arousal in some ways limits processing of information, leading particular individuals to utilize processing lessons learned from past experiences of anger and threat. We discuss how and why different individuals may have different processing tendencies, especially related to the detection of anger and threat. We then review how and why other individuals might, as a product of their experiences of anger and threat, develop different anger- and threat-related processing schemas.