Investigating whether the belief  that anger reinforces one’s  ideology can motivate one to  feel angry

Individuals have instrumental motives to feel anger, meaning that they might find anger useful depending on the situation. Leftists and Rights ideologies have different attributions to emotions. Previous findings indicated that believing that an emotion reinforces one’s ideology motivates one to experience the emotion. Based on this assumption, a research was drawn to examine if the same results were replicable to the emotion anger: Does the belief that anger reinforces one’s ideology, reinforces one to feel angry? To closer examine this question, participants were given articles informing that anger reinforces their ideology. Subsequently, they were requested to rank eight different fictitious headlines according to their reading preference. These headlines were associated with either anger, hope, fear or neutral (two for each emotion), previously verified in a pre-test. The measure was done via a two-way analysis of variance (ANCOVA). The same analyzed whether the belief that...Show moreIndividuals have instrumental motives to feel anger, meaning that they might find anger useful depending on the situation. Leftists and Rights ideologies have different attributions to emotions. Previous findings indicated that believing that an emotion reinforces one’s ideology motivates one to experience the emotion. Based on this assumption, a research was drawn to examine if the same results were replicable to the emotion anger: Does the belief that anger reinforces one’s ideology, reinforces one to feel angry? To closer examine this question, participants were given articles informing that anger reinforces their ideology. Subsequently, they were requested to rank eight different fictitious headlines according to their reading preference. These headlines were associated with either anger, hope, fear or neutral (two for each emotion), previously verified in a pre-test. The measure was done via a two-way analysis of variance (ANCOVA). The same analyzed whether the belief that anger reinforces one’s ideology had an increase in the participants motivation to experience anger. However, the results were not significant. There is no apparent evidence that the belief that anger reinforces one’s ideology does motivate one to feel anger.Show less

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Investigating whether the belief that anger reinforces one’s ideology can motivate one to feel angry