These results suggest that the participants had a reduced sense of agency over their button-pressing when they felt fear and anger. This provides some of the first evidence that going through extreme negative emotions can in fact make people feel less in control, as has often been assumed. And the fact that this effect was found using an implicit measure of agency, rather than by simply asking participants whether they felt in control, suggests that it may be happening at a fairly fundamental level.
But there are limitations to the study: most noticeably that there was no condition in which the researchers induced a positive emotion like happiness. It could be that strong emotional states generally reduce people’s sense of agency, regardless of whether they are positive or negative. And one of the two fear experiments did not actually produce a significant result but was only reported as a trend, so it remains to be seen whether the results will be replicated in another sample.
