Stanford psychologists have found that people's motivations play an important role in how they react to an unpleasant situation.
A new study found that when a person wants to be calm, they remain relatively calm towards angry people, but if they want to feel angry, they are heavily influenced by angry people. The researchers also found that people who wanted to feel angry became more emotional when they learned that others were just as upset as they were.
Scientists made this conclusion based on the results of a series of laboratory experiments. To investigate how people react to adversity and relate to others, the researchers examined anger at politically controversial events in a series of laboratory studies with 107 participants. The team also analyzed nearly 19 million tweets in response to the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
In laboratory studies, scientists showed participants images that could cause negative emotions in them. For example, people burning the American flag and American soldiers bullying prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The researchers also told participants how other people felt about the images.
They found that participants who wanted to feel calm were three times more likely to be influenced by people expressing calm emotions than angry people. But participants who wanted to feel angry were also three times more likely to be influenced by other angry people than those who felt calm emotions. The researchers also found that these participants became more emotional when they learned that others also felt similar emotions.
The results of this study, scientists say, suggest that the best way to regulate your emotions is to start by choosing your environment. “If you don't want to be angry today, one way to do it is to avoid angry people. Do some have an ingrained preference for stronger emotions than others? This is one of my next questions,”says Amit Goldenberg, lead author of the study and at Stanford University.
Nikita Shevtsov