05 November 2023 , 23:13
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If you're trying to reach your goals, new research suggests it can be beneficial to get angry.
This emotion helps people overcome obstacles and challenges which may get in the way of their ambitions.
A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology discovered that participants who undertook several challenging tasks in a state of anger performed better than those who felt different emotions, like desire, sadness or amusement. The lead author of the study, Heather Lench is a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Texas A&M University.
She said the findings indicate that people can use anger as a motivator. Lench said: "We found that anger led to better outcomes in situations that were challenging and involved obstacles to goals."
However, anger failed to boost people's performances regarding easier assignments, the study revealed. There were six experiments, each testing whether anger aided people achieve specific tasks.
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Lench reported that the most intriguing result was from the first experiment, which tested the number of word puzzles people could solve whilst feeling different emotions. The experiment involved 233 undergraduate students at Texas A & M.
Each student was assigned one emotion at random: desire, anger, sadness, amusement or just a neutral state of being. They were shone different images for five seconds to help them feel the emotion. Those given anger were shown insults about the school's football team, for example.
Then participants had twenty minutes to unpack as many words as possible from four sets of seven anagrams shown on a computer screen. These varied in difficulty, but once participants moved on from a puzzle, they were unable to return and try again.
A computer programme logged how long participants spent on each puzzle. The results indicated that angry participants solved more puzzles than participants feeling any other emotion.
Angry participants finished 39 per cent more puzzles than students feeling neutral and those feeling angry also demonstrated further persistence by spending more time attempting to solve the puzzles, Lench commented.
She said: “When people were angry and they persisted, they were more likely to succeed. But in all the other emotional states, when they persisted, they were more likely to fail. So it seems to suggest that people were persistent more effectively when they were angry.”
Additional experiments questioned whether anger might motivate students to sign a petition, help earn high scores on a video game, or prompt them to cheat on login and reasoning puzzles just to win prizes. But in all situations, participants in the angry state were more likely to attain their intended goal.