United States: A new study has suggested that people who are angry perform better while doing challenging tasks than those who are emotionally neutral.
“These findings demonstrate that anger increases effort towards attaining a desired goal, frequently resulting in greater success,” Dr. Heather Lench, the first author of the study, commented.
The study, held by researchers at Texas A&M University, was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The research team conducted experiments involving more than 1,000 people and analysed survey data from more than 1,400 people to study the possible impact of anger on people in various circumstances.
In one experiment, students were shown images previously found to elicit anger, desire, amusement, sadness, or no particular emotion at all. Then, participants were asked to solve a series of anagrams.
The results found that for a challenging set of anagrams, those who were angry performed better than those in the other emotional states. No difference was seen between these groups for easy anagrams. In another experiment, participants who were angry did better at dodging flags in a skiing video game than those who were neutral or sad.
“This pattern could indicate that general physical arousal had a benefit for game scores, as this would be greater in anger, amusement, and desire conditions compared to the sad and neutral conditions,” the researchers noted. However, no such differences were reported when it came to an easier video game.
One experiment suggested being angry increased the degree to which participants cheated on tasks compared with the other emotions, except amusement.
According to Dr. Lench, people often prefer to use positive emotions as tools more than negative ones and tend to see negative emotions as undesirable and maladaptive.
“Our research adds to the growing evidence that a mix of positive and negative emotions promotes wellbeing and that using negative emotions as tools can be particularly effective in some situations,” the researcher added.
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