Anger can be a bad, bad thing — in business, in life, in almost any pursuit that requires that you get things accomplished anger has a way of causing us to chase ghosts and worse, beat them into a bloody mess when we believe we have found them.

There is one thing that anger does that is actually quite useful, it motivates us. It kicks us out of complacency and occasionally is just what the doctor ordered in order to get us to push our projects to the next level.

We all know this implicitly, and now researchers have a few more words on the matter –

…researchers find that associating an object with anger actually makes people want the object – a kind of motivation that’s normally associated with positive emotions.

People usually think of anger as a negative emotion. You’re not supposed to get angry. But anger also has some positive features. For example, it activates an area on the left side of the brain that is associated with many positive emotions. And, like positive emotions, it can motivate people to go after something. “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 Henk Aarts of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, first author of the new study. He and his colleagues wanted to examine whether this also applies to the link between anger as a negative emotion and the desire to get your hands on something.

Read Anger Makes People Want Things More (Via Medical News Today)(Images)

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