Anger as emotional intelligence

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Chapter 11 endnote 8, from How Emotions are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett.
Some context is:

You can even work yourself up deliberately into a frothing anger. [...] Knowing just when to get angry is a key aspect of emotional intelligence.

I know a professor at a university in France who is a transplant from another culture, and he has observed a curious ritual practiced by his French colleagues. Every so often, one of the faculty becomes furious during a disagreement and lunges toward his opponent. Others in the group dutifully grab the angry colleague in mid-lunge and restrain him until he calms down.

One day, my non-French friend decided to try it out. In the middle of a contentious faculty meeting, he stood up, shouted, and strode forward. His colleagues were stunned, but after a moment's hesitation, they gripped his arms and held him back. From that day forward, they stopped treating him as an outsider.

For more information, on anger as emotional intelligence, see these references.[1][2][3][4][5][6]


Notes on the Notes

  1. Kim, Min Y, Brett Q Ford, Iris Mauss, and Maya Tamir. 2015. "Knowing when to seek anger: Psychological health and context-sensitive emotional preferences." Cognition and Emotion 29 (6): 1126-1136.
  2. Sinaceur, Marwan, and Larissa Z Tiedens. 2006. "Get mad and get more than even: When and why anger expression is effective in negotiations." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 42 (3): 314-322.
  3. Van Dijk, Eric, Gerben A Van Kleef, Wolfgang Steinel, and Ilja Van Beest. 2008. "A social functional approach to emotions in bargaining: when communicating anger pays and when it backfires." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 94 (4): 600.
  4. Van Kleef, Gerben A, and Stéphane Côté. 2007. "Expressing anger in conflict: when it helps and when it hurts." Journal of Applied Psychology 92 (6): 1557.
  5. Van Kleef, Gerben A, Carsten KW De Dreu, and Antony SR Manstead. 2004. "The interpersonal effects of anger and happiness in negotiations." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 86 (1): 57.
  6. Lerner et al., 2003 [full reference to be provided]