Anger Can Be Good If You're Striving Towards A Goal, New Research Suggests

For this study, researchers wanted to better understand the role of anger in achieving goals. To do so, they conducted a series of experiments with over 1,000 participants, as well as analyzed separate data from over 1,400 other respondents.

The experiments involved having participants feel different emotions, ranging from amusement, to sadness, to anger, to neutral, by showing them different visuals. Then, the participants would be presented with different challenges, such as word puzzles, video games, etc.

As far as the data analyzed, the researchers looked at surveys from recent U.S. presidential elections on voting and the anger participants felt around the election.

In both instances, anger proved to make a difference in people's behaviors—and how well they reached their goals. Namely, anger improved people's ability to reach their goals in the game experiments, and was sometimes even linked with shorter response times. These beneficial effects of anger were more significant when the goals were more challenging.

Anger is typically thought of as a negative emotion that we need to control or repress, but the findings of this study suggest it can actually be a motivating force when we're trying to reach a goal.

As Lench notes, it's well and good to strive for happiness, but a mix of emotions, including negative emotions like anger, result in the best outcomes and can be useful.

"People often prefer to use positive emotions as tools more than negative and tend to see negative emotions as undesirable and maladaptive," she says, adding, "Our research adds to the growing evidence that a mix of positive and negative emotions promotes well-being, and that using negative emotions as tools can be particularly effective in some situations."