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Got a challenging goal you want to achieve? Getting angry may help.

Despite sometimes being seen as a negative emotion, research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology has found that anger can be a powerful source of motivation for people to achieve their goals.

“We selected anger for this study because it often gets a bad reputation as an emotion – it’s often seen as destructive or dangerous, and we wanted to examine if anger could be useful in situations that included challenges/obstacles to goals. It’s important because it relates to what people should do with anger in their everyday life – if anger is never useful, it should be avoided or suppressed. If anger is sometimes useful, then people should pay attention to it and how they respond to it,” Heather Lench, PhD, lead author of the study and a professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Texas A&M University. 

“Anger resulted in people overcoming obstacles/challenges to their goals in a variety of situations. It did not help in other types of situations. It also did not always result in “good” outcomes (in one study, people were more likely to cheat when they were angry), but it did result in better success overcoming challenges.”

The study is based on the functionalist theory of emotion, which suggests that any emotion, whether good or bad, is useful in specific situations. Under the theory, emotions are seen as a reaction to a specific event and may serve a purpose of alerting a person to take action.

Sadness may suggest that a person should seek out emotional support or help. Anger might suggest that a person needs to take steps to overcome an obstacle.

To explore the role of anger in the achievement of goals, the researchers enlisted 1000 participants for a series of experiments. They also examined data from surveys of more than 1400 people.

During the experiments, the researchers triggered an emotional response or a neutral emotional state from the participants. The emotional responses included anger, sadness, amusement or desire.

They then set each of the participants a goal that was challenging. Some of the goals were to solve some word puzzles or to achieve a high score on a video game that involved skiing. Some of the tasks were harder than others.

The researchers found that anger improved the ability of people to reach their set goal, compared with those who had a neutral emotional state. For some people, anger gave them a higher score or a shorter response time. In one of the experiments, the researchers found anger also increased the rate of cheating in order to reach a better outcome.  

Anger proved to be a powerful motivating force.

“Anger is associated with a “readiness for action” across our physiology, cognition, and behavior. It prepares us to respond to challenges. In situations where our success depends on overcoming obstacles, it can be extremely motivating,” Lench said.

The researchers also examined data from surveys taken during the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.

Prior to the election, people were asked to rate how much anger they would have if their preferred candidate did not win the election. Following the elections, the participants were asked if they voted and who they voted for.

The researchers found that the survey participants who reported that they would be angry if their preferred candidate didn’t win were more likely to vote.

The researchers note that this suggests that anger can increase efforts towards reaching goals.

Lench says the research demonstrates that anger isn’t always bad, and can actually be useful in the right context.

“Anger can be useful in overcoming obstacles and challenges. That does not mean it’s always beneficial or that we should respond automatically when we’re angry. It does mean that anger can be a helpful emotion in specific types of situations,” she said.

“Anger itself is not good or bad – it is simply preparing us to respond to challenges to our goals. Seeing it as a signal that something important is happening (a challenge to our goals), and then assessing what our goals are (are they really what we want long term)? And how we’re responding to the challenge (smashing a computer is not a great way to overcome the challenge of it crashing; taking it to be fixed is probably more effective).”