Want to get things done? That’s where getting angry might help.
Anger can be a powerful motivator for achieving goals, according to new research from the American Psychological Association (APA).
The study, published this week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, looked at how both positive and negative emotions affect the odds of success.
“People often believe that a state of well-being is ideal, and the majority of people consider the pursuit of happiness to be their primary goal in life,” said lead author and professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Texas A&M University. says Dr. Heather Wrench. said in a press release.
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“Although the view that positive emotions are ideal for mental health and well-being has been prominent in general psychological explanations of emotions, previous research has shown that combinations of emotions, including negative emotions such as anger, suggests that this will yield the best results.”
Of all the emotions, the researchers focused on anger. That’s because anger is hypothesized to “support goal achievement even in the face of hardship,” the study said.
An APA study published this week found that anger increased achievement levels across all experiments. (St. Petersburg)
This assumption was tested through various experiments.
These include sticking to difficult puzzle tasks, cheating to win prizes, physically avoiding objects in video games, and signing petitions to avoid financial loss. This includes:
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Another part of the study looked at how anger influenced voting behavior in the presidential election.
They tested the behavior of 1,000 participants and found that in all experiments, anger improved people’s ability to accomplish their goals.
The experiment allowed the participants in the new study to achieve high scores on a skiing video game, with one person focusing on avoiding flags and the other on avoiding high jumps. (St. Petersburg)
These results included increased scores, decreased response times, and even fraud.
The study analyzed data from the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections and found that voters who said they would be angry if their candidate didn’t win were more likely to vote.
Texas A&M’s Wrench noted in a press release that anger seems to motivate people most often when the goal is more difficult.
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In some experiments, other emotions such as enjoyment and desire were also associated with goal achievement, but “negative” emotions such as sadness and boredom seemed to be helpful as well.
Anger seems to motivate people most often when the goal is more difficult.
“People often prefer to use positive emotions as a tool over negative ones, and tend to think of negative emotions as unwanted and maladaptive,” says Rench.
“Our study adds to the evidence that a combination of positive and negative emotions promotes well-being, and that using negative emotions as a tool can be particularly effective in some situations,” she says. added.
A psychologist told FOX News Digital that long-term anger may not have the same impact on success. (St. Petersburg)
New York University psychologist Dr. Yamaris Diaz, who was not involved in the new study, weighed in on the findings, calling the “theoretical” implications to Fox News Digital “interesting.”
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”[The findings] “It may suggest new ways to help people think about channeling negative emotional states into adaptive/functional behaviors,” she said in an email.
However, psychologists objected that the study had “limited practical implications” by measuring how physiological and emotional arousal affects “gaming/simulation cognitive function”. chanted.
A new study finds that anger is not associated with goal achievement when the goal is “relatively easy” to achieve. (St. Petersburg)
“When a person is slightly activated by arousal/stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol, they become more alert and focused, but when exposed to activation (emotional arousal) too much or for too long, cognitive/stress It has long been understood to have a negative impact on function,” Díaz wrote.
Therefore, while anger may motivate short-term goal achievement (such as exercising, “anger cleaning,” or pursuing creative projects), long-term anger is unlikely to have the same impact. Diaz emphasized.
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“Overall, I think studies like this can help us think about ways to better understand the link between emotion and behavior, but we need to be careful about overinterpreting the results,” she says.
“But it’s a positive thing to channel a little bit of negativity into a positive goal,” she said.
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