Hilarious Journal Articles #27: Anger May Be Good For You

From the Carnegie Mellon press release:

A provocative new study has found that people who respond to stressful situations with angry facial expressions, rather than fearful expressions, are less likely to suffer such ill effects of stress as high blood pressure and high stress hormone secretion...

"We tested whether facial muscle movements in response to a stressor would reveal changes in the body's two major stress-response systems—the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and the hypothalamic pituitary adrenocortical (HPA) axis. Analyses of facial expressions revealed that the more fear individuals displayed in response to the stressors, the higher their biological responses to stress. By contrast, the more anger and disgust (indignation) individuals displayed in response to the same stressors, the lower their responses," said Jennifer Lerner, the Estella Loomis McCandless Associate Professor of Psychology and Decision Science at Carnegie Mellon and lead author of the study.

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