People’s sense of control over actions is reduced when angry or afraid: study

Participants put into a fearful or angry state really do seem to have a reduced sense of agency, according to a paper published recently in Experimental Brain Research, raising questions about the accountability of people going through extreme emotions. Crucially for current purposes, intentional binding only occurs for deliberate, voluntary actions, and in fact a larger intentional binding effect is usually taken by researchers as evidence that a participant feels more in control of her or his actions. Across three experiments – two that induced fear and one anger – the researchers found that participants had reduced intentional binding when they were in an emotional state.

Source: digest.bps.org.uk