Abstract: In this article, I am discussing the notion that anger can be considered a positive emotion for those who feel it and for society at large. Anger has the ability to motivate people to act against injustice and norm violations in general and it provides the actor with (physical) strength, but also with an optimistic tendency to take risks. However, as a caveat it should be noted that even though anger does this for both men and women, women who show anger are liked less.
One in five (22%) US Americans reported recently having “experienced anger a lot yesterday” (Gallup World Poll, 2019). That surely is a bad thing? Webster’s Thesaurus’ list of synonyms for anger includes animosity, antagonism, embitterment, enmity, hostility, malevolence, and virulence, all of which refer to strife and destruction (Merriam Webster, 2019).Berkowitz and Harmon-Jones (2004)define anger as: “a syndrome of relatively specific feelings, cognitions, and physiological reactions linked associatively with an urge to injure some target” (p. 108). It is in this sense that Gallup adds anger to its Negative Experience Index, together with such states as worry and stress. Interestingly, the question is related to feeling angry – that is, Gallup considers feeling angry a negative experience. But is it? In Gallup’s view feeling anger is negative because it signals that there are things out there that cause this feeling – negative things in fact. But is reacting with anger to a negative event necessarily a bad thing? And for whom?
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