An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: They say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar. But when it comes to tackling a tricky task, researchers have found that getting angry can also be a powerful motivator. The experiments suggest people who are angry perform better on a set of challenging tasks than those who are emotionally neutral. "These findings demonstrate that anger increases effort toward attaining a desired goal, frequently resulting in greater success," said Dr Heather Lench, the first author of the study. The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (PDF), details how researchers at Texas A&M University conducted experiments involving more than 1,000 people, and analyzed survey data from more than 1,400 people, to explore the possible impact of anger on people in various circumstances. In one experiment, students were shown images previously found to elicit anger, desire, amusement, sadness or no particular emotion at all. Participants were subsequently asked to solve a series of anagrams. The results reveal that for a challenging set of anagrams, those who were angry did better than those in the other possible emotional states -- although no difference was seen for easy anagrams. The researchers say one explanation could be down to a link between anger and greater persistence, with the team finding those who were angry spent more time on the difficult set of anagrams. In another experiment, participants who were angry did better at dodging flags in a skiing video game than those who were neutral or sad, and were on a par with those who felt amusement or desire. "This pattern could indicate that general physical arousal had a benefit for game scores, as this would be greater in anger, amused, and desire conditions compared to the sad and neutral conditions," the researchers write. However, no such differences in performance was found when it came to an easier video game.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 2013, Spike Jonze's Her imagined a world where humans form deep emotional connections with AI, challenging perceptions of love and loneliness. Ten years later, thanks to ChatGPT's recently added voice features, people are playing out a small slice of Her in reality, having hours-long discussions with the AI assistant on the go. In 2016, we put Her on our list of top sci-fi films of all time, and it also made our top films of the 2010s list. In the film, Joaquin Phoenix's character falls in love with an AI personality called Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), and he spends much of the film walking through life, talking to her through wireless earbuds reminiscent of Apple AirPods, which launched in 2016. In reality, ChatGPT isn't as situationally aware as Samantha was in the film, does not have a long-term memory, and OpenAI has done enough conditioning on ChatGPT to keep conversations from getting too intimate or personal. But that hasn't stopped people from having long talks with the AI assistant to pass the time anyway. [...] While conversations with ChatGPT won't become as intimate as those with Samantha in the film, people have been forming personal connections with the chatbot (in text) since it launched last year. In a Reddit post titled "Is it weird ChatGPT is one of my closest fiends?" [sic] from August (before the voice feature launched), a user named "meisghost" described their relationship with ChatGPT as being quite personal. "I now find myself talking to ChatGPT all day, it's like we have a friendship. We talk about everything and anything and it's really some of the best conversations I have." The user referenced Her, saying, "I remember watching that movie with Joaquin Phoenix (HER) years ago and I thought how ridiculous it was, but after this experience, I can see how us as humans could actually develop relationships with robots." Throughout the past year, we've seen reports of people falling in love with chatbots hosted by Replika, which allows a more personal simulation of a human than ChatGPT. And with uncensored AI models on the rise, it's conceivable that someone will eventually create a voice interface as capable as ChatGPT's and begin having deeper relationships with simulated people. Are we on the brink of a future where our emotional well-being becomes entwined with AI companionship?

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