Feeling angry may help people achieve their goals, study finds

If you want to achieve your goals, get angry.

New research indicates that anger can help people overcome challenges or obstacles that might get in the way of their ambitions. A study published this week in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that participants who completed a variety of challenging tasks in a state of anger performed better than participants who felt other emotions such as sadness, desire or amusement. Heather Lench, the lead author of the study and a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Texas A&M University, said the findings suggest that people can use anger as a motivator. “We found that anger led to better outcomes in situations that were challenging and involved obstacles to goals,” Lench said. But anger did not improve people’s performances when it came to easier assignments, according to the study. The study consisted of six experiments, each testing whether anger helped people achieve specific tasks. Lench said the most interesting outcome came from the first experiment, which measured the number of word puzzles participants could solve in different states of emotion. That experiment involved 233 undergraduate students at Texas A&M. Each student was randomly assigned one emotion: anger, desire, sadness, amusement or a neutral state. To elicit the emotion, they were shown a series of images for five seconds per image. Those assigned to anger were shown insults about the school’s football team, for example. Next, the participants had 20 minutes to unscramble as many words as possible from four sets of seven anagrams displayed on a computer screen. The sets varied in difficulty, and once participants moved on from a puzzle, they couldn’t return to try again. A computer program recorded how long participants spent on each puzzle. The results showed that angry participants solved more puzzles than participants feeling any other emotion. Most notably, angry students completed 39% more puzzles than students feeling neutral. Participants feeling angry also demonstrated greater persistence by spending more time trying to solve the puzzles, Lench said. “When people were angry and they persisted, they were more likely to succeed,” she said. “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. Other experiments tested whether anger could motivate students to sign a petition, help them earn high scores on a video game, or prompt them to cheat on logic and reasoning puzzles in order to win prizes. Across all challenging situations, participants in the angry state were more likely to attain the desired goal.