Emotions Revealed: Understanding Faces and Feelings by Paul Ekman

Author:Paul Ekman [Ekman, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781780225500
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2012-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

A major limitation of this study – not knowing what was happening to their hearts when these people glared – was remedied in our next study. My former student Erika Rosenberg and I examined patients who had been diagnosed as already having serious coronary artery disease. They were vulnerable to what are called ischemic episodes, during which the heart does not get enough oxygen for a period of time. When this happens most people experience pain, angina, which tells them to stop whatever they are doing because they are at risk of having a heart attack if they don’t. The patients we were studying had silent ischemia, no pain, no warning when their heart was not getting enough oxygen.

In this collaborative study21 with James Blumenthal’s research group at Duke University, the patients were again videotaped in a mildly challenging interview. This time a continuous measure of ischemia was obtained from an imaging device pressed against their chest that produced a picture of their heart as they talked. We measured their facial expressions during a two-minute period when they answered questions about how they dealt with anger in their lives.

Those who became ischemic showed a full or partial anger expression on their face much more often than the patients who did not become ischemic. Showing anger in their face when they talked about past frustrations suggests that they were not just talking about anger; they were reliving their anger. And anger, we know from other research, accelerates heart rate and increases blood pressure. It is like running up a flight of stairs; you shouldn’t do it if you have coronary artery disease, and not everyone did. Those who didn’t become angry were much less likely to become ischemic.

Before explaining why we think we obtained these findings, let me make clear that this study did not show that anger caused heart disease. Other research22 has found that either the personality trait of hostility, or the emotion of anger (and it is not certain which it might be), is one of the risk factors for producing heart disease, but that is not what we did. Instead we found that in people who already have heart disease, getting angry increased their risk of becoming ischemic, which puts them at increased risk for having a heart attack. Now let us consider why these people became angry when they talked about being angry in the past, and why that put them at risk.

All of us talk about emotions we are not feeling at the moment. We tell someone about a sad event, a time when we got angry, what made us afraid, and so forth. Sometimes in the course of describing a past emotional experience we begin to experience the emotion all over again. That is what I believe happened to the people who became ischemic. They could not talk about angry experiences without becoming angry again, without reliving their anger. Unfortunately, for people with coronary artery disease, that is dangerous. Why did this happen to

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