Seen and Unseen: How Anger’s Conscious and Unconscious Detection Relates to Its Subjective Experience

Anger is a powerful emotion that plays a key role in social interactions, but how it is processed—especially outside of awareness—remains poorly understood. In this study, we examined how individual differences in subjective anger (state, trait, and expression styles) relate to the conscious and non-conscious detection of angry, fearful, happy, and neutral facial expressions. Using two validated tasks (Facial Expression Recognition Task and Continuous Flash Suppression), we assessed 60 university students’ ability to detect emotional faces. Results showed that angry faces were consciously recognised faster and more accurately than fearful faces, but were detected more slowly under non-conscious conditions. Notably, individuals with higher externalised anger were better at recognising angry faces consciously, while those with higher internalised anger showed slower non-conscious detection of anger relative to fear. These findings suggest that anger expression styles—internalising vs. externalising—are linked to distinct perceptual biases. This study highlights the need to consider both conscious and unconscious processes when examining how emotions like anger shape our perception of the world.