re: #223 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

When our survival depended on sticking together and working together through a basic crisis like predation by cave bears, a cold winter or a food shortage, then yes.

As for our long-term survival, it is a less beneficial trait.

BBC pop-psychs got ‘ya:

Why It Pays to Be Grumpy and Bad-Tempered

…Then in 2009 Matthijs Baas from the University of Amsterdam decided to investigate. He recruited a group of willing students and set to work making them angry in the name of science. Half the students were asked to recall something which had irritated them and write a short essay about it. “This made them a bit angrier, though they weren’t quite driven to full-blown fits of rage,” he says. The other half of the group were made to feel sad.

Next the two teams were pitched against each other in a game designed to test their creativity. They had 16 minutes to think of as many ways as possible to improve education at the psychology department. As Baas expected, the angry team produced more ideas - at least to begin with. Their contributions were also more original, repeated by less than 1 percent of the study’s participants

getpocket.com