People who often give way to anger also tend to believe that they are more intelligent than they really are.
According to a new study on this phenomena has found that anger, as an emotion, is quite complicated and that it has a relationship with other "negative emotions" like depression or anxiety.
"Anger is more approach-oriented and associated with optimistic risk perception and generally optimistic bias," said study author Marcin Zajenkowski of the University of Warsaw.
The study stemmed out of the thought on whether people with high levels of anger manifest a bias in perception of their abilities and competence, he added. Specifically, this study involved testing whether high anger leads to a positive intelligence illusion or not.
Two studies were conducted with 528 participants and researchers found that those who described themselves as having a short fuse tended to overestimate their intelligence levels. All the participants were gauged by a measure of how prone they are to anger and were asked to rate their own intelligence. They were handed a 25 point scale, after which they took actual intelligence tests.
One of the reasons why individuals with high-trait anger have a tendency to think that they are smarter than they actually are, is because this part of the anger is associated with narcissistic illusions, said Zajenkowski to PsyPost.
The study also found that in spite of the connection between anger and intelligence, in reality, it was unrelated to the person's actual smartness. This study only dealt with one facet with anger, and "future studies may explore whether temporary experience of state anger also leads to biased perception of their abilities," Zajenkowski said.
Results also revealed that "Trait-Anger" is positively inter-correlated with neuroticism to a substantial extent. This means that the higher the anger, the higher the levels of neuroticism, both feeding into each other. However, neuroticism was found to suppress the association between anger and subjectively assessed intelligence.
Researchers published a paper titled "Why do angry people overestimate their intelligence? Neuroticism as a suppressor of the association between Trait-Anger and subjectively assessed intelligence" in the journal Intelligence.
