In many Western countries, people are urged to manage feelings of anger or suffer its ill effects - but new research suggests that anger may actually be linked with better, not worse, health in certain cultures.

Researchers from the University of Michigan found that the truism linking anger to ill health may be valid only within the cultural boundary of the West, "where anger functions as an index of frustration, poverty, low status and everything else that potentially compromises health."

"Many of us in Western societies naively believe that anger is bad for health, and beliefs like these appear to be bolstered by recent scientific findings," researcher Shinobu Kitayama of the University of Michigan said in a statement. "These findings show how socio-cultural factors go under the skin to influence vital biological processes."

For the study, researchers examined data from American participants drawn from the Midlife in the United States survey and data from Japanese participants drawn from the Midlife in Japan survey.

To measure health, the researchers looked at biomarkers for inflammation and cardiovascular functioning, both of which have been linked to anger expression in previous research. The combination of these two factors served as a measure of overall biological health risk.

The researchers also looked at measures that gauged various aspects of anger, including how often participants expressed angry feelings through verbally and physically aggressive behaviors.

Researchers found that greater anger expression was associated with increased biological health risk among American participants.

But greater anger expression was associated with reduced biological health risk among Japanese participants. And the association was not explained by other potentially related factors -- such as age, gender, chronic health conditions, smoking and alcohol consumption, social status, and experience of negative emotions more generally.

"The association between greater anger and compromised biological health, taken for granted in the current (Western) literature, was completely reversed so that greater anger was associated with better biological health among Japanese," Kitayama explained.

The findings, which were published in Psychological Science, suggest that the link between anger expression and health reflects different experiences across cultural contexts. In the United States, expressing anger seems to reflect the degree to which people experience negative events, while in Japan it may reflect the degree to which people feel empowered and entitled.