It often happens that, when we are in a bad mood, we find ourselves in situations where, you don’t know how, we end up arguing with someone. Anger is a magnet for this kind of situation ; at the very least we notice that the intentions or points of view of others rub shoulders with our own, an exchange of arguments takes place that normally leads nowhere.

This fact alone seems annoying, but there is something worse about this tendency to get into trouble: when we are in a bad mood we are significantly worse at reasoning and making decisions. And no, this doesn’t happen with all emotions.

Anger makes us take a more aggressive approach to expressing our point of view rather than keeping a low profile, but at the same time it distorts our way of thinking so that what we say and the way we act does not reflect who we really are; our identity is totally distorted by a flurry of emotion.Let’s see what this curious psychological effect consists of.

Emotions mixed with rationality

Research in psychology has shown for decades that when we learn about the environment, others or ourselves, we do not do so simply by accumulating objective data that comes to us through the senses.

What happens, rather, is that our brain creates explanations about reality by using the information that comes from the outside. It acts, more or less, like the spectator of a movie, who instead of memorizing the scenes he is watching builds a meaning, imagines the plot of this and from that anticipates what may happen in future scenes.

In short, we maintain an active role by constructing in our imagination an explanation of the facts that goes beyond what we see, touch, hear, etc.

This idea, which was already researched in the first half of the 20th century by Gestalt psychologists, means that our analysis of situations is influenced by everything that is happening in our brain, rather than relying solely on sensory data.

That is, that our emotions are mixed with those mental processes that we usually consider rational: the creation of arguments with which to refute the point of view of a colleague, the making of decisions when choosing a new car… and also the interpretation of what others do, for example.

Emotions and moods totally influence cognitive processes that are theoretically only based on logic and reason. And anger and rage, in particular, have a great capacity to interfere with these phenomena, as we shall see.

When anger controls us

Research has shown that a few drops of anger are enough to distort our ability to use reason , even if we compare this to what happens when we are under the influence of other emotions.

For example, being in a bad mood makes us much more likely to perceive strange and ambiguous behavior as a provocation to us, or it can even make a neutral explanation of events look like an attack on our ideology or opinion.

Similarly, being in a bad mood will make it easier for us to remember past experiences in which we were also angry, and at the same time will make it easier for us to attribute bad moods to others . In a manner of speaking, when we are angry we tend to interpret reality in a way that is congruent with that emotional state, with the glasses of bad mood.

Although we may not realize it, anger totally conditions our social life, and significantly increases the possibility that we will react in an unreasonable way, even betraying our ethical values and convictions. Let’s look at some examples.

Bad mood takes over

An American researcher welcomes a number of volunteers who have volunteered to participate in his project and then asks them to recall an experience that made them feel very angry and to explain in detail how it happened. To another group of participants, the researcher asks for something similar, but instead of remembering and explaining an experience that made them very angry, they should do it with one that is very sad. The members of a third group are asked to remember and explain any experience they choose.

The investigator then asks volunteers to imagine being on a jury that will decide the guilt of some people in cases of misconduct. They are provided with detailed information about these fictitious people and what they did, and from that data they must give a verdict. However, in half of the cases the person to be judged guilty has a Hispanic name, while in the rest of the cases the name has no relation to a minority.

Well, the results show that people who had remembered the experiences that produced anger, but not the other two groups, were significantly more likely to see guilt in the person with the Hispanic name. The fact that they had rekindled some of the anger they had experienced one day had made them xenophobic for a few minutes .

The explanation

The experiment we have seen and its results were part of a real investigation whose conclusions were published in the European Journal of Social Psychology .

The team of researchers explained this phenomenon by pointing out that anger is an emotion that has an extraordinary power to cause rationality to become dominated by the irrational, unfounded and intuitive beliefs and, in general, biases, which include stereotypes about a person’s race and cultural origins.

Thus, while emotions such as sadness have a more cognitive component and depend on abstract thinking, anger is more primary, depends less on the mental processes linked to abstractions and depends more on the amygdala, one of the brain structures of the limbic system, the part of our nervous system that generates emotions. In some way, the power of influence of this emotion is more powerful , and it can get involved in all kinds of mental processes, since it acts “from the root” of our brain.

That is also why, when the same team of researchers who conducted the previous experiment did a similar one asking participants to give their opinion about an article advocating a particular policy measure, they saw that people who had been driven into a slightly sad mood decided their opinion about the article based on the content of the article, while the angry people were more influenced by the authority and the curriculum vitae of the supposed authors of the text.

So when you notice that bad moods take hold of you, keep in mind that not even your rationality will be spared from the influence of this emotion. If you want to maintain a constructive attitude toward your social relationships, it is best to avoid arguing over unimportant details with others.