Want to achieve your goals? Get angry because it makes you try harder, scientists say

If you want to be a high-achiever, getting angry may help.

When people are angry, they tend to put in more effort towards achieving their goals, experts believe.

A study recruited 233 students and showed them images which were either neutral or designed to provoke amusement, sadness, desire or anger — for example, insulting their university’s football team.

Then they were given a set of tricky anagrams to unscramble in 20 minutes, and find the words they contained.

When people were angry, they managed to correctly solve 39 per cent more anagrams.

If you want to be a high-achiever, getting angry may help. That’s  because experts believe that when people are angry, they tend to put in more effort towards achieving their goals (stock)

It appeared they were trying harder, as they spent more time on the more difficult anagrams, rather than giving up.

However, a second experiment found people were also more likely to cheat in tests when angry.

Professor Heather Lench, who led the study from Texas A&M University, said: ‘People often believe that a state of happiness is ideal, and the majority of people consider the pursuit of happiness a major life goal.

‘The view that positive emotion is ideal for mental health and well-being has been prominent in lay and psychological accounts of emotion, but previous research suggests that a mix of emotions, including negative emotions like anger, result in the best outcomes.’

People may be evolutionarily programmed to respond to anger with action to overcome an obstacle.

The new study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, combined five separate experiments involving more than 1,000 volunteers.

In another experiment, the goal was to attain high scores on a skiing video game, with one easy version only involving jumps, while another more difficult version required avoiding flags on a slalom course.

On the more complicated game, anger resulted in better scores compared to when people were kept in a neutral emotional state.

When people were angry, they managed to correctly solve 39 per cent more anagrams

A second experiment found people were also more likely to cheat in tests when angry (stock)

But this was not the case on the less challenging game.

However angry people did have faster reaction times when asked to press a button in response to a shape flashing up on a screen.

While anger was associated with increased success across the study, in some cases, amusement or desire were also associated with increased achievement of goals.

Professor Lench said: ‘People often prefer to use positive emotions as tools more than negative and tend to see negative emotions as undesirable and maladaptive.

‘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.’

Separately, researchers found people were more likely to vote in an election if they said they would be angry if their candidate did not win.