14 DAY TRIAL // If you're married, and your spouse is constantly angry, that may tell you more about the climate of your overall relationship than about what feelings they are experiencing at any given time.
In relationships where people get accustomed to expressing anger constantly, this becomes the means of communication even if neither of them is feeling anger during an argument. This also makes them less likely to detect sadness in their partners, LiveScience reports.
“This means that if a couple falls into a climate of anger, they tend to continue expressing anger regardless of how they actually feel," he said. "It becomes a kind of a trap they cannot escape,” Baylor University expert Keith Sanford writes in the April 30 issue of the Journal of Family Psychology.
The bottom line is that anger trumps sadness, the investigator adds. This is very bad, since the evolutionary role of sadness is to bring people in a relationship closer together when they fight, increasing their likelihood of remaining together despite adversity.