Anger—your inner fiend or your friend? Or both? What's the role of emotion?

About a year ago in Good brain, bad brain? Bring it all to the negotiation table, I wrote about the research article "Thinking straight while seeing red: The influence of anger on information processing," in which researchers looked at the effects of anger on decision-making and thinking. The effects are sometimes positive.

Today in Negotiation, I saw some related thoughts in the sidebar of an article titled "Will your emotions get the upper hand?" (pdf)

Angry individuals approach situations with confidence, a sense of control, and negative thoughts about others. In negotiation, these appraisal tendencies can trigger overconfidence, unrealistic optimism, and aggression, yet they buffer decision makers from indecision, risk aversion, and overanalysis, write Jennifer Lerner and her colleague Larissa Tiedens of Stanford University. In addition, anger can motivate us to stand up for ourselves and others in the face of injustice.

Given these different patterns, Lerner and Tiedens raise the interesting question of whether anger, despite being widely regarded as a negative emotion, can be considered a positive force in some instances.  . . .

Of course, it can. But I think we are in need of a clear description of anger. From "Are you happy?" an article in The New York Review of Books:

Let us agree to a moratorium on the use of single words, such as fear, anger, joy, and sad, and write about emotional processes with full sentences rather than ambiguous, naked concepts . . .  .

Read "Law Professor Urges Courts to Re-consider Bar on Emotions in the Courtroom" for a discussion of the relationship between reason and emotion. Excerpt:

In his article "The Emotional Juror," published recently in the Fordham Law Review, [Todd] Pettys points to recent advances in psychology and neurology that suggest emotion plays a much larger role in formulating our logical thinking than was previously known.

For instance, he cites research demonstrating that when we feel a powerful emotion, our brain looks for evidence that supports that emotion while discounting evidence that is in opposition. In this way, our emotional response over time becomes a belief borne of what we think is a logical assessment of the evidence.

How true! Have you observed that search for evidence to support emotion in yourself? Your clients? I answer "yes" to both questions. The line between emotion and reason is fuzzy and shifty and situational, don't you think? And there is a time and a place for every emotion—including anger. Agree?