Areas › Anger › The fear underneath anger
The angry face is standard human equipment. It looks the same in every country, and people born blind make it too, so nobody had to teach you either to pull it or to read it.
That cuts two ways for you. Yours is showing when you are sure you are hiding it, and people answer what they see rather than what you meant. And when you catch it on somebody else, your body has already responded before you decided anything, which is worth remembering before you treat that response as evidence.
Qur’an and Sunnah
We shall certainly test you with fear and hunger (Quran 2:155). Fear is listed alongside hunger among ordinary human conditions, which is where this equipment belongs too.
وَلَنَبۡلُوَنَّكُم بِشَيۡءࣲ مِّنَ ٱلۡخَوۡفِ وَٱلۡجُوعِ وَنَقۡصࣲ مِّنَ ٱلۡأَمۡوَٰلِ وَٱلۡأَنفُسِ وَٱلثَّمَرَٰتِۗ وَبَشِّرِ ٱلصَّٰبِرِينَ
We shall certainly test you with fear and hunger, and loss of property, lives, and crops. But [Prophet], give good news to those who are steadfast
Qur’an 2:155read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a placebo-controlled experiment, women with borderline personality disorder saw anger in ambiguous faces more quickly and with stronger amygdala responses than others, and oxytocin reduced that sensitivity. Reading anger in a face happens fast, and how fast varies between people. It was a small study in one group, so it says more about the process than about how common the difference is.
Bertsch K, Gamer M, Schmidt B, Schmidinger I, Walther S, Kästel T, Schnell K, Büchel C, Domes G, Herpertz SC. (2013). Oxytocin and reduction of social threat hypersensitivity in women with borderline personality disorder.. The American journal of psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A signal everybody reads without learning gets read very fast and without checking.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Not every threat needs answering. A knock to your pride is not a danger to your safety, and it does not require a defence.
Some of the fights you take up for other people are your own old fight, unfinished, borrowed onto somebody else's ground.
If you genuinely cannot remember what you said, that is often true rather than a dodge. Under a big surge of stress the part of the brain that writes the story goes quiet, while the part that records the feeling gets louder.