Recent research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association suggests that repeated bouts of anger could have the potential to increase your risk of cardiovascular health.

The study entitled “Translational research of the acute effects of negative emotions on vascular endothelial health: finding from a randomized controlled study” was published in May of 2024 and led by Dr. Daichi Shimbo, a Cardiologist and Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology in the Department of Medicine at Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Shimbo and his team examined the acute effects of provoked anger, and secondarily, anxiety and sadness on endothelial cell health, which is an overall indicator of vascular health.

Heart Study Methodology and Results

The study included 280 healthy adult participants who were randomized to an 8‐minute anger recall task, a depressed mood recall task, an anxiety recall task, or an emotionally neutral condition.

Following the session, researchers used a combination of serological markers to assess endothelial cell health.

Additionally, they tested for reactive hyperemia, or how quickly blood vessels are able to expand and facilitate blood flow after an occlusion.

Researchers found that anger negatively affected endothelial cell health by impairing the blood vessels’ ability to dilate, restricting blood flow.

This impaired state persisted up to forty minutes after the recall exercise, before returning to baseline. These findings were not identified for the other emotional states.

“Our data suggest that maybe the mechanisms that explain anxiety and sadness in heart disease risk are different than those that explain anger. So it tells us: be careful about lumping different negative emotions in the same bucket,” said Shimbo.

Anger and Heart Attack Risk

This is not the first study to suggest that the emotion of anger could affect your health.

A study published in The European Heart Journal Acute Cardiovascular Care suggests that having an episode of intense anger was associated with an 8.5 times greater risk of having a heart attack during the following 2 hours.

The study looked at 313 people who were being treated in a hospital for a heart attack. The men and women were asked to fill out a questionnaire about the level of anger they experienced in the last 48 hours based on a number scale from 1-7.

Level 1 was being “calm” and level 7 was “enraged, out of control, throwing objects and hurting yourself or others”. For study purposes, the threshold of acute anger was defined by level 5 – “very angry, body tense, maybe fists clenched, ready to burst”.

An anger level greater than 5 was reported among seven of the people in the study in the two hours prior to their heart attack, and up to four hours prior for one person.

An anger level of 4 was reported among two people within the the two hours before heart attack symptoms, and among four hours before for three people.

According to the researchers, the results come to a 8.5-fold increase in relative risk of a heart attack in the two hours following severe anger. People who reported high levels of anxiety, also had a higher risk.

Another Perspective on Understanding Anger

When we think about potentially destructive emotions, we often think about anger. And for good reason.

Anger is probably the most common emotion that we have that leads to feelings of regret later. Dr. Matsumoto doesn’t believe anger is inherently a “bad” emotion; getting angry can result in some good in our lives and in society. Anger, and all other basic emotions, exist for a reason.

In our evolutionary history, being angry (and disgusted and afraid and sad, etc.) was functional for us. That is, anger, as all other basic emotions, helped us deal with problems in our lives and in our environments in order to survive.

In our evolutionary past, emotions like anger were important in order to deal with many life struggles. All our emotions allowed us to handle incredibly difficult events that required us to think with minimal conscious awareness.

Emotions have helped us deal with birth, death, finding food, fighting for mates and resources, and everything else required for living for eons.

Anger, and all other emotions, have helped us deal with all these problems of living. Put another way, if we didn’t have anger (and the other emotions), we wouldn’t be here in the first place.

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Humintell Director David Matsumoto recently appeared on the Social-Engineer Podcast: The Doctor Is In Series – where they discuss understandings and developments in the field of psychology.

In their latest episode, Social Engineer CEO Chris Hadnagy and Director of Education Dr. Abbie Marono interview Dr. Matsumoto on the topics of emotion and nonverbal communication.

The Origins of Human Emotion

They began the podcast by speaking about the origins of human emotion where he addressed claims that facial expressions of emotion are not innate or universal in nature.

Dr. Matsumoto points out that the thought that emotions are not innate and entirely constructed is actually a minority thought or concept within the field itself, although it gets a lot of traction.

Matsumoto’s Olympic Study

They discuss Dr. Matsumoto’s famous Olympic Judo Study entitled Spontaneous Facial Expressions of Emotion of Congenitally and Noncongenitally Blind Individuals.

This study was conducted at the 2004 Athens Olympic and Paralympic Games where photographs were taken during medal matches in the judo competition.

From these images, Dr. Matsumoto and his team were able to study the first reactions of these judo athletes when they won or lost a medal match.

The results of this study of 84 athletes from 34 countries, showed that winners were immediately smiling. Losers generally showed sadness or disgust or anger. Importantly, there were no cultural differences in these reactions.

Additional images were taken of Paralympic athletes, many of them who were congenitally blind from birth. Researchers compared the images of the sighted and non-sighted athletes and found an amazing amount of similarity between them.

This research (and many others like it) suggests that the capacity to have emotions and facial expressions of emotion is biologically innate.

Behavioral Indicators of Mal-Intent

The conversation then shifted to discussing behavioral indicators of malicious intent.

Dr. Matsumoto emphasizes that much of his research and work has focused on immediate threats and is relevant for those who work at security checkpoints or in harm’s way. He delved into some of the research he’s conducted and their results.

A Writer’s Obligation

They discuss the anonymity and human factors that affect behavior as well as Dr. Matsumoto’s 7th Edition of his book Culture and Psychology.

He emphasizes that he now wants to focus his energy and knowledge on helping others.

The post Understanding Human Behavior with Dr. David Matsumoto first appeared on Humintell.

“Who’s so cute? Yes you are. You’re so cute, aren’t you?” Baby talk sounds pretty similar whether we’re cooing to babies or our dogs.

In fact, research has even suggested that dogs’ brains are sensitive to the familiar high-pitched “cute” voice tone that adult humans (especially women) use to talk to babies.

But an interesting new study entitled “The face behind the caring voice: A comparative study on facial prosodic features of dog-, infant- and adult-directed communication” has has spotted a crucial difference:

When baby talking to infants, our faces tend to be overly expressive—wide-open eyes, high eyebrows, and exaggerated smiles. With dogs, we’re far more stoic, researchers report in a new study in Applied Animal Behaviour Science.

Dogs and Baby Talk

Scientists have been studying baby talk with dogs (and more recently, cats) for more than 40 years. In fact research has found similarities between infant and dog brains during the processing of speech with such a high-pitched tone feature.

But little work has been done on the facial expressions that go along with the baby talk.

Anna Gergely, an evolutionary biologist and dog owner wondered whether there might be differences between how we coo to our fur babies and our human ones. So she designed a study to answer that question.

Dog Study Methodology

In the new study, Gergely and her colleagues recruited 23 Hungarian couples who had both a baby between 6 months and 18 months old and a pet dog.

While visiting the families in their homes, the researchers asked the parents to speak three short monologues individually to the dog, the baby, and the other parent.

The monologues involved things like teaching a new word, reciting a nursery rhyme, or reading a script of everyday sentences such as, “What nice weather!”

Gergely and her colleagues filmed the parents’ faces while they were speaking to their partner, pet and infant. Later, the researchers used “face-reading” software to analyze the parents’ facial expressions and muscle movements.

Dog Study Results

Gergely’s study suggested that the parents’ faces were the most intensely expressive—with more exaggerated expressions—when talking to their babies, especially when reciting the nursery rhyme and scripted sentences.

The facial expression recognition software ranked their expressions as particularly happy and often evoking surprise, Gergely says.

By contrast, participants had the least amount of facial muscle movement and the most neutral expressions when they were talking to their dogs—even though they seemed to be using a voice nearly identical to what they used with their babies.

Dr. Matsumoto’s Thoughts

Dr. Matsumoto thinks it is far fetched to suggest that humans talking to dogs know or have memorialized different meanings of faces in the animal kingdom.

Instead he suggests that there are many possible reasons why humans may be more expressive with infants than with their canine companions.

Here are a few:

1. When humans talking to infants they are even more animated, which requires additional signaling. In turn, this additional signaling recruits more behaviors, including faces. Another difference not discussed is that human – infant signaling is stronger, i.e., more intense.

2. Humans unconsciously speak animatedly for infants to learn about how to read facial expressions. This is less important for other animals.

3. Infants can verbalize many different emotional states, and can thus refer to them in their facial expressions. Infants will learn about multiple states and their links to language. This is less important and not required for animals.

What do you think about the possibilities Dr. Matsumoto outlined above? Which do you think is most plausible?

The post Study: We Use “Baby Talk” With Our Dogs But Not Baby Faces first appeared on Humintell.