ANN/THE STAR – Aargh!! Anger isn’t a pleasant feeling.
According to Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Texas A&M University Dr Heather Lench, anger shouldn’t be avoided, suppressed, or ignored.
Instead, it can serve as a motivating force to conquer obstacles and attain challenging objectives.
In an article published in the widely-read Scientific American, Dr Lench explained that anger signifies encountering a barrier to a meaningful goal.
When experiencing anger, she advises individuals to pause, assess the situation, and strategise the most effective response to accomplish their objective before taking action.
She gives an example, “In an argument with a romantic partner, if your long-term aim is to improve the relationship, anger can motivate appropriate next steps, including expressing your needs, working to a compromise and listening.”
Focusing on reaching the more immediate goal of winning the argument, however, may cause you to raise your voice, ignore your partner’s perspective and act aggressively, to the detriment of your relationship.
Another example: You’re working on an important project and your computer keeps crashing. Your anger could motivate you to take the device to a repair shop or to smash it on the floor.
Both actions remove the obstacle, but only the former furthers your long-term goal, namely, completing the project.
To test the effect of anger on achieving challenging goals, Prof Lench and her colleagues designed a series of experiments in which some of the more than 1,000 participants were given tasks meant to make them angry, while others were given tasks that weren’t.
All of them then completed tasks involving a clear goal, along with a challenge to that goal.
Professor Lench said that the research team repeatedly found that the participants who got angry quickest were more successful than the others in mastering the challenges – they were more persistent, for example.
When the goals weren’t challenging though, getting angry didn’t improve outcomes.
The findings don’t mean that you should deliberately get yourself riled up to achieve a goal, clarified Professor Lench, because anger can lead to actions having serious negative consequences.
But whenever you do feel anger, “don’t push it away”, she said. “Make it work for you instead.”
