New research has found a positive association between anger and creative performance. Anger appears to enhance creative performance, particularly when elicited through imaginative processes and directed toward malevolent aspects of creativity. The research was published in Cognition and Emotion.
Anger is an intense emotional response to perceived threats, injustices, or frustrations. It is often accompanied by physiological arousal, such as an increased heart rate and tension. Anger serves as a natural and adaptive reaction, motivating individuals to address problems or protect themselves from harm. While anger can be constructive when expressed healthily, uncontrolled or excessive anger may lead to interpersonal conflicts, stress, and negative health outcomes.
Some researchers have found that anger can stimulate more creative thoughts, while others have proposed that it hinders creativity. However, the nature of the link between anger and creative performance might depend on the specific characteristics of the situation and the motivation behind the anger.
Study author Liangyu Xing and her colleagues aimed to explore the relationship between anger and creative performance in greater detail. They were particularly interested in identifying the factors that determine whether anger boosts or hinders creative performance. These researchers conducted a meta-analysis.
They began by searching a number of databases for scientific articles exploring the link between creative performance and anger. They used various formulations of anger and creativity as their search terms, including “creativity,” “creative,” “divergent thinking,” “innovation,” “anger,” and “angry” in both English and Chinese. The authors looked for studies that measured performance on at least one creativity-related task and either explicitly manipulated mood states (to make participants angry) or measured naturally occurring mood states (how angry participants felt).
This search resulted in 2,947 articles matching the search terms. After excluding articles that were irrelevant to the topic or did not meet the inclusion criteria, 23 articles remained. Of these, 18 presented results from experimental studies, in which researchers manipulated participants’ moods (i.e., made them angry), while 5 were non-experimental studies, in which researchers measured how angry participants naturally felt. These studies were published between 2008 and 2024 and included a total of 2,413 participants.
Overall, the researchers found a weak positive association between anger and creative performance. In other words, angry participants tended to perform slightly better on creative tasks. However, the strength of this association varied significantly both within and between studies.
Further analysis revealed that the positive association between anger and creative performance was somewhat stronger in studies conducted on participants from Eastern countries, while it was almost nonexistent in studies on participants from Western countries. More recent studies also showed a stronger association between anger and creative performance compared to older studies.
Anger was more strongly associated with malevolent creativity than with general creativity. Malevolent creativity refers to the use of creative thinking to devise harmful, unethical, or destructive solutions, ideas, or actions to achieve malicious goals. Anger was also more strongly linked to creative performance when imagination was involved. Finally, experimental studies (those that actively induced anger in participants) found stronger associations between anger and creative performance than non-experimental studies.
“Specifically, anger appears to enhance creative performance, particularly when it is elicited through imaginative processes and directed towards malevolent facet of creativity. However, the link between anger and creative performance was not influenced by the type of creative task used, the reported creative outcome, or the time limitation of the task,” the study authors concluded.
The study sheds light on the connection between anger and creativity. However, it focused on basic mood anger and did not examine secondary emotions, such as aggression and hostility, that often accompany anger. These emotions might play an important role in understanding the link between creativity and anger.
The paper, “The relationship between anger and creative performance: a three-level meta-analysis,” was authored by Liangyu Xing, Wenyu Zhang, Yikuan Kan, and Ning Hao.