FRIDAY, Aug. 13 (HealthDay News) -- Even though anger is a
negative emotion, angry people tend to pay more attention to
rewards than threats, a new study finds.
Previous research has found that people with other types of
negative emotions, such as fear or anxiety, tend to focus more on
threat than reward. For example, they'll spend more time looking at
a picture of a person holding a knife threateningly than a picture
of a sexy couple.
On the other hand, people experiencing a positive emotion such
as excitement are drawn to rewards, explained Brett Q. Ford, of
Boston College, and colleagues.
"Emotions can vary in what they make you want to do. Fear is associated with a motivation to avoid, whereas excitement is associated with a motivation to approach. It can make you want to seek out certain things, like rewards," Ford said in an Association for Psychological Science news release.
In the study, volunteers were asked to write for 15 minutes
about one of four personal memories, and were assigned to write
about a time when they were angry, afraid, excited/happy, or felt
little or no emotion. Depending on the emotion the participant had
been assigned, a five-minute piece of music was played to reinforce
the feeling.
After completing the writing task, the volunteers were asked to
look at two side-by-side pictures. The investigators used a device
that monitors eye movement to determine how much time the
volunteers spent focusing on each picture. They found that
volunteers who had been assigned to recall an angry memory spent
more time looking at rewarding pictures, as did the people who
recalled feeling happy and excited.
The findings suggest that visual attention may not be related to
negative versus positive emotions, but instead related to how a
person's emotions motivate them. For example, anger might motivate
someone to approach something in an aggressive way, while happiness
might cause someone to want to approach things in a social or
friendly way, the study authors noted in the news release.
"Attention kicks off an entire string of events that can end up influencing behavior," the authors concluded in the news release.
The study findings were released online in advance of
publication in an upcoming issue of
Psychological Science.
More information
The American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy
explains how
anger affects families.