14 DAY TRIAL // This last discovery of a team of psychologists is rather interesting because it mainly says that anger, which is considered a negative emotion, also has some of the features of positive emotions.
After the experiments they carried out, the researchers found that associating an object with angry feelings, will only make people want it more, and this is normally a motivation connected to positive emotions.
The study had each participant watching a series of images of common objects (like a pen or a mug) on a computer screen.
What the subjects did not know was that just before every object appeared, the screen flashed either an angry face, a scary face or a neutral one – subliminal images.
The flashes attached an emotion to each image, and at the end of the experiment, in one version, the participants were asked how much they desired every object, and in a second version, they were asked to squeeze a handgrip in order to get the object they desired – the harder the squeeze, the more chances of getting it.
Most people worked harder to get the objects linked to angry faces – nobody wanted the objects linked to fear.
Henk Aarts of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, first author of the new study, said that “this makes sense if you think about the evolution of human motivation.”
In a case of limited food in a certain environment, those people who link food to anger and turn aggression into an attack response to get the food, have more chances of survival.
“If the food does not make you angry or doesn't produce aggression in your system, you may starve and lose the battle,” he explained.
Another interesting fact is that people taking part at this experiment had no idea that their desire of a certain object was linked to anger.
“When you ask people why they work harder to get it, they say, 'It's just because I like it.'
“That shows how little we know about our own motivations,” said Aarts.
Most people, when thinking about anger, they associate it with a negative emotion, and a good education says that you are not supposed to get angry.
But what this new research shown is that there actually some good in all this – anger activates the area on the left side of the brain which is linked to positive emotions.
“People are motivated to do something or obtain a certain object in the world because it's rewarding for them.
“Usually this means that the object is positive and makes you happy,” says Aarts.
The new study is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.