IF YOU want to attract attention, get angry. Both men and women notice angry faces faster than other expressions, and men react to angry male faces fastest of all.
Matt Williams of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Jason Mattingley of the University of Melbourne, Australia, asked 78 men and 78 women to look at sets of four to eight faces showing a variety of expressions.
For most facial expressions, adding more neutral faces to the array distracted the participants and their reaction times got slower. But not for angry faces: adding more “distraction” faces didn’t affect the response times…
