Angry responses give some people pleasure: study

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - Some people just love to tease and researchers think they have found out why.

They believe people who goad others to incite an angry response may have an unconscious need for power linked to high testosterone levels.

Testosterone is a male sex hormone that is also produced in women. Scientists at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor found that angry expressions are rewarding for some, which could explain why certain people like to tease others so much.

"Individuals who are high in testosterone, a hormone that is usually a biological marker of a need for dominance, love to do things that make other people at least fleetingly angry," said Professor Oliver Schultheiss, a co-author of the study.

"They like to tease and they will do whatever leads to an angry look on somebody's face again and again. They will learn it more quickly and execute it more efficiently," he added in an interview.

The researchers measured testosterone levels in saliva samples from 78 men and women and asked them to do a series of complex sequence learning tasks on a computer that produced either a happy face, an angry expression or no face at all.

They found that both men and women who were high in testosterone in relation to other members of the same sex learned the task that produced the angry face more easily. But others with low testosterone levels did not.

"For people who showed better learning on the angry face sequence ... you can assume there is something about the angry face that is rewarding for them," said Schultheiss, who reported the findings in the journal Physiology and Behavior.

There was no gender difference between men and women.

Michelle Wirth, lead author of the study, said the findings suggest that perceived emotional facial expressions are signals that may guide human behavior.

"These unconscious motivations influence our non-conscious behavior whether we like it or not. They may make some of us more obnoxious than others by turning us into teasers or hecklers," Schultheiss added.