I wish I could think of a positive point to leave you with,” Woody Allen once said at the end of a standup routine. “Will you take two negative points?” Life is not quite like mathematics. Two wrongs do not make a right, just as two of Allen’s recent films do not add up to one of his earlier ones. Nonetheless, the gag gets something very right: Sometimes you can be positive by being negative.
Researchers at Harvard Medical School have now shown this to be the case with anger in the workplace. They found that people who tried to repress frustration at work were more likely to feel trapped under a glass ceiling than those who found ways to let it all out.
The advice is not quite “if you want to get ahead, lose it first.” It is important that the anger is channeled constructively. “Individuals who learn how to express their anger while avoiding the explosive and self-destructive consequences of unbridled fury have achieved something incredibly powerful in terms of overall emotional growth and mental health,” said Professor George Vaillant, lead author of the study.
As is often the case, science has been slow to confirm what most people already know. Anger clearly has its proper place at work, which is neither wholly absent nor ever present. The manager who is an emotional blank is just as hard to work for as the volcanic boss, and both can do great harm by setting an unhelpful example for what kind of emotional expression is expected and accepted.
When some people are not pulling their weight, for example, isn’t it quite right and proper to get more than a little peeved? Throwing things around the office is not going to help, but showing a bit of anger is the only way of truly reflecting the importance of what is going on.
The alternative view would have us believe that the emotionally mature can achieve the same results without the need for primal emotions; calm talk will do just as well. That is not just wrong, it is creepy.
When you try to cool down hot emotions, what tends to happen is that you end up either repressing them or losing them altogether. Neither is desirable. Without emotion, much social interaction loses its meaning, or changes for the worse.
Take the disciplining of children, for example. The parent who never shows any anger and simply dishes out punishment in cold blood comes across not as a caring guardian, but as frightening, heartless automaton. When we show emotion we show that we care, and without that, many of our actions and reactions become meaningless.
Indeed, without emotion it seems unlikely we can even have morality. As the Scottish philosopher David Hume argued in the 18th century, intellect alone is insufficient to motivate any caring for ourselves and others. As he colorfully put it, “Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” Cold-hearted ethics is an oxymoron.
Repression is slightly more complicated. It is just another bit of psychobabble to think that it is always bad to try to control our feelings. People sometimes talk as though negative emotions are like fully formed objects that have to be expelled from the body. But emotions are not simply there: How we deal with them affects how they are. For instance, deal with a relatively minor irritant well at an early stage, and it will simply go away. Deal with it badly, by getting into an unnecessary row, for example, and it grows into a many-headed hydra of hatred.
The Harvard anger report is a timely reminder that emotions are in themselves neither good nor bad. What makes them so is how appropriate they are to the situation, and how we deal them. Anger, for instance, may be rehabilitated by the study, but that does not make it an unqualified good. Indeed, a report last December by a team at Ohio State University suggested that a half-hour row with a spouse can add a day to the time it takes for a wound to heal.
This does not contradict the Harvard study, but backs it up. The point about a protracted domestic row is that is a prime example of anger boiling over uncontrollably rather than being dealt with properly.
In many cases, anger is seen as a justified and proportionate response to wrongdoing. And so it should be. Progress on social justice requires the evocation of anger and guilt even more than it does love and hope. Slavery was abolished because people were enraged by its injustice and prepared to make supporters of it feel very guilty indeed.
One reason why it has become harder to promote the beneficial side of emotions such as anger is that the moral vocabulary of good and bad has been replaced by the self-help lexicon of positive and negative thinking. Armed with such pop-psychology, it is easy to convince ourselves we are emotionally literate when in fact we are just using crude rules of thumb to gloss over the complexities of the human psyche. We become like botanists who think that being able to label a specimen means we know all we need to know about it.
In this sense, a little learning about psychology can be a dangerous thing. Whatever the merits of positive thinking, its prevalence has oversimplified the way we conceptualize our emotional lives. “Bad” emotions have an important role to play, while sometimes “positive thinking” leads us away from uncomfortable truths into the realms of wishful thinking.
I would not want to go as far as Woody Allen and suggest that two negative points are as good as a positive one. But negative thoughts about positive thinking should not be taboo. More than that, the universal injunction to think more positively should make us just a little bit angry.
