The research, led by Liliana Capitão at the Centre for Research in Psychology at the University of Minho and supported by the Bial Foundation, set out to answer a deceptively simple question. If anger is such a salient social signal, does everyone’s visual and cognitive system treat it the same way? The answer, published in the journal Cognition and Emotion under the title “The anger you see and the anger you don’t: awareness and expression styles in facial emotion processing”, is a qualified no. Individual differences in anger management, the study found, are associated not only with the accuracy of emotion recognition but also with the speed at which emotional signals reach conscious awareness.

The stakes of this question are higher than they might first appear. Facial expressions are among the most important social signals humans possess, allowing us to rapidly interpret the emotions and intentions of the people around us. Among the basic emotions, anger occupies a particularly consequential position, because it often signals interpersonal threat or conflict. Misreading an angry face, or failing to register one quickly enough, can have consequences for relationships, for mental health and even for physical health, given the established relevance of anger to cardiovascular wellbeing. Understanding the mechanisms underlying anger perception and regulation, the researchers note, remains a major challenge for contemporary science.

Despite how readily anger is recognised in visible faces, relatively little has been known about how anger-related signals are processed under different perceptual conditions, and how that processing might vary from one individual to the next. Most previous work has focused on average performance across groups of participants, treating the human emotion-recognition system as broadly homogeneous. The University of Minho study takes a different approach, asking whether the characteristics of the perceiver, specifically their habitual style of expressing or suppressing anger, colour the way emotional information is handled by the brain.

To investigate this, the team recruited 60 healthy adults, each of whom completed two distinct emotional processing tasks. The first assessed the participants’ ability to consciously recognise facial expressions: faces were clearly visible, and participants simply had to identify which emotion was being displayed. The second task probed something subtler, namely how long different facial expressions took to break through into conscious awareness after initially being suppressed by competing visual stimuli. This kind of masking paradigm is a standard tool in experimental psychology, allowing researchers to separate the processing of a stimulus from the conscious experience of it, and to measure the threshold at which perception becomes awareness.

Crucially, the study also measured individual styles of anger expression. Some people tend to externalise anger, directing it outward at others; others tend to suppress it, holding the emotion in. The researchers assessed these tendencies in each participant and then examined how they related to performance on the two tasks. This design allowed the team to look at two separate dimensions of emotional processing, recognition accuracy and the speed of conscious access, and to ask whether they were influenced in different ways by the same individual characteristics.

The results revealed a strikingly distinct pattern depending on the task. When participants viewed visible faces and were asked to identify the expressed emotion, angry faces were recognised more accurately than fearful faces, confirming the special salience of anger under ordinary viewing conditions. But when the facial expressions were initially concealed by competing visual stimuli, the hierarchy flipped: fearful faces reached conscious awareness more rapidly than angry faces. In other words, anger dominates when a face is plainly visible, while fear appears to enjoy an advantage in the race to awareness when information is degraded or contested by other visual input.

Individual differences then added a second layer of complexity. Participants with a stronger tendency to externalise anger identified angry expressions more accurately than fearful expressions, suggesting that an outward-facing anger style is associated with heightened sensitivity to visible anger signals in others. In contrast, participants who tended to suppress their own anger took longer to become aware of angry faces than of fearful or neutral faces when the expressions were initially masked by other visual stimuli. For these individuals, anger was not missing from perception altogether, but it was delayed on its path to consciousness, emerging more slowly than other emotional signals under conditions of perceptual competition.

“We concluded that anger signals are not processed uniformly”, says Liliana Capitão, adding that “the way each person manages anger is associated with how they perceive it in others”. The statement captures the study’s central contribution: the relationship between an individual’s emotional characteristics and their cognitive processing is not a fixed, general property of the mind, but one that may vary depending on the specific emotion involved. A person’s habitual way of dealing with anger does not simply make them better or worse at reading faces across the board; it selectively shapes how anger, in particular, is detected and prioritised.

The findings carry implications that extend beyond the laboratory. They highlight the importance of considering emotions from a multidimensional perspective, and of incorporating individual differences into the models researchers build to explain anger perception and regulation. Averages across participants, the study suggests, can obscure meaningful variation: two people with identical overall accuracy on an emotion-recognition test may nonetheless differ in how quickly angry signals reach their conscious awareness, and that difference may be traceable to how each of them handles anger in their own lives. For a signal as consequential as anger, one that speaks of threat and conflict and bears on mental and cardiovascular health, such individual variation is far from a footnote. It suggests that the universal language of facial expressions, long taken for granted, is read with a personal accent, and that understanding social perception fully will require attending not only to the faces we see but to the emotional habits we bring to the act of seeing.

Subject of Research: Individual differences in anger expression and suppression and their association with facial emotion recognition and conscious awareness of angry faces

Article Title: Do we all see anger the same way?

Article References: Do we all see anger the same way?. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: anger perception, facial expressions, emotion recognition, conscious awareness, anger suppression, anger externalisation, visual masking, individual differences, social signals, Cognition and Emotion, experimental psychology, Bial Foundation

Border-ownership, or BO, refers to the assignment of a visual contour to one object rather than another. We live in a three-dimensional world in which nearby objects partially occlude distant ones, and the brain must decide which side of each edge belongs to the foreground. This process, first explored by the Gestalt psychologists in illusions such as Rubin’s face-vase figure, determines whether a patch of the image is perceived as an object or as background. Regions that lose possession of their borders become background, and background regions are recognised more poorly and encoded less strongly into memory. In extreme cases, such as the cigar illusion described in the paper, an object embedded in a brick wall can remain completely invisible because its borders are incorrectly assigned to the surrounding bricks, only becoming visible once an observer is told where to look.

At the neural level, border-ownership is encoded by specialised neurons found in large numbers in mid-tier visual areas such as V2, V3 and V4. These cells respond not merely to the presence of a contour but to which side of it belongs to a figure, a property first demonstrated in the monkey visual cortex by Zhou and colleagues in 2000 and confirmed in many subsequent studies. The authors of the new work propose that sustained, recurrent interactions between these border-ownership cells and neurons in primary visual cortex are essential for building a stable percept of an object. Metacontrast masking, they reasoned, might work precisely because the mask disrupts this recurrent dialogue by flipping the direction of ownership at the target’s borders, instantly demoting the target region from figure to background.

Metacontrast masking occurs when a briefly presented target is followed by a mask whose contours closely abut those of the target, such as two flanking bars surrounding a central target bar. In the standard paradigm, the borders of the black target bar are initially owned by the target, but when the mask appears the ownership direction reverses: the flanking bars take over the shared contour and the former target region becomes background. The researchers noted that this gain-of-ownership by the mask is common to many metacontrast designs, yet had never been isolated as a causal factor. They therefore built new masking paradigms in which the mask either reversed ownership of the target’s borders or left the ownership direction intact, holding everything else as constant as possible.

In Experiment 1a, seven participants judged which of two briefly flashed vertical bars, one on each side of a fixation cross, was longer. Target duration varied from 33 to 133 milliseconds, and the target was always immediately followed by one of two masks. The BO-reverses mask was a traditional pair of flanking black bars. The BO-stable mask contained the same bars but added extra black regions so that a central grey area formed the shape of the letter I, which participants perceived as a coherent object thanks to its central position, convex corners and the familiarity of letter shapes. The psychometric fits were excellent, averaging a coefficient of determination of 0.95, and the slopes did not differ between conditions, suggesting that decision uncertainty and sensory noise were unaffected. Crucially, the target discrimination threshold was 78 milliseconds in the BO-reverses condition versus 67 milliseconds in the BO-stable condition, a statistically significant difference that shows participants needed more viewing time when the mask reversed border ownership.

Experiment 1b refined the design by holding target duration constant at 67 milliseconds while independently varying the stimulus onset asynchrony, or SOA, between target and mask from 0 to 150 milliseconds, with sixteen participants and a larger, more convincing I-shaped mask. Accuracy showed the classic U-shaped relationship with SOA characteristic of Type B masking, with performance dropping sharply at intermediate SOAs in the 30-to-100-millisecond range. Masking was consistently stronger with the BO-reverses mask: the difference between mask types emerged at around 33 milliseconds and became highly significant, after Bonferroni correction, at the 50, 67 and 83 millisecond SOAs. The difference in the fitted minima of individual masking functions was significant across the group, and a generalised linear mixed-effects model including mask type fitted the data far better than a model without it. In six of the fifteen participants the individual effect was itself statistically significant.

The strongest test came in Experiment 2, which confronted a fundamental limitation of the first experiments: the two mask types differed physically in their amount of black area and hence in luminance flux. To eliminate this confound as far as possible, the team exploited the transparent-bar illusion developed by the group of Rudiger von der Heydt. A configuration of light and dark grey rectangles is normally perceived as two overlapping transparent bars, but rounding the inner corners by a few pixels flips the percept into four separate rectangles. The two masks were nearly pixel-identical yet produced opposite border-ownership assignments at the target boundary. The task also changed: participants compared the contrast of a checkerboard target, presented where the mask would appear, with that of a reference checkerboard in the opposite visual field, allowing the researchers to measure perceived contrast directly rather than inferring visibility from a length judgement.

The results were unambiguous. The four-rectangle, BO-reversing mask reduced the perceived contrast of the target significantly more than the transparent, BO-stable mask at the 50, 67 and 83 millisecond SOAs, while the two masks behaved identically at the shortest SOAs. Because the physical contrast of the BO-reversing mask was, if anything, slightly lower due to the rounded corners, energy-based theories of masking would predict the opposite result. A separate Type A style effect, in which perceived contrast dropped at the shortest SOAs regardless of mask type, was attributed to surround suppression, a suppressive interaction between concurrent stimuli that does not depend on perceptual organisation. The masking effect in this experiment was modest, reducing perceived contrast by a few percent rather than rendering the target invisible, but the principle was clearly demonstrated: subtle manipulations of perceptual organisation can substantially weaken a metacontrast mask.

The findings are difficult to reconcile with classical accounts of metacontrast that rely on inhibitory interactions between luminance contours or on transient-onset channels interrupting sustained target activity, since the contours and transients were closely matched across conditions in both experiments. Instead, the results align with theories in which masking disrupts reentrant, feedback processing and figure-ground assignment. The authors propose that a reversing mask rapidly curtails the activity of border-ownership cells that signal the target’s figural status, cutting short the recurrent interactions with early visual areas that are thought to be critical for conscious perception. A stable mask, by contrast, keeps the same population of border-ownership cells active, allowing prolonged recurrent processing and a stronger percept. The framework also shares conceptual ground with object substitution theory, in which a mismatch between reentrant target information and new feedforward mask information degrades perception, but here the mismatch is specified in the well-characterised language of border-ownership circuits.

The broader message is that conscious vision depends not just on detecting contours but on the sustained and consistent assignment of those contours to objects. The timing of the effects fits neatly with known physiology: recurrent signals take roughly 50 milliseconds to return to primary visual cortex from higher areas, and it is precisely in the 30-to-100-millisecond window that border-ownership reversal wreaks its havoc, with the strongest difference between mask types observed at the 50 millisecond SOA where the mask appeared exactly as the target vanished. Earlier work by O’Herron and von der Heydt showed that border-ownership signals can persist briefly after a stimulus disappears and are rapidly reversed by new objects that claim ownership, which may explain why the effect survived interstimulus intervals between target and mask. The authors note open questions, including whether the reversal primarily affects surface properties such as contrast and colour while sparing contour detection, and whether masks that preserve contrast polarity as well as ownership direction would be weaker still. What is already clear is that the brain’s internal model of the visual world must be built and maintained over time, and that the moment a mask steals an object’s borders, the object’s claim on perception collapses.

Subject of Research: The role of border-ownership reversals in metacontrast masking and visual perception

Article Title: Border-ownership reversals determine the strength of metacontrast masking

Article References: Dijksterhuis, D. E., Vreugdenhil, N., Roelfsema, P. R., & Self, M. W. (2026). Border-ownership reversals determine the strength of metacontrast masking. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 88(7), Article 193. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-026-03339-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3758/s13414-026-03339-z

Keywords: border-ownership, metacontrast masking, visual perception, figure-ground segregation, psychophysics, V2, recurrent processing, visual masking, conscious perception, border-ownership cells, object perception, stimulus onset asynchrony