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hubie [soylentnews.org] writes:

When you're in a bad mood, you might want to focus on tasks that are more detail-oriented [arizona.edu]:

Vicky Lai, a UArizona assistant professor of psychology and cognitive science, worked with collaborators in the Netherlands to explore how people's brains react to language when they are in a happy mood versus a negative mood.

"Mood and language seem to be supported by different brain networks. But we have one brain, and the two are processed in the same brain, so there is a lot of interaction going on," Lai said. "We show that when people are in a negative mood, they are more careful and analytical. They scrutinize what's actually stated in a text, and they don't just fall back on their default world knowledge."

[...] "We show that mood matters, and perhaps when we do some tasks we should pay attention to our mood," Lai said. "If we're in a bad mood, maybe we should do things that are more detail-oriented, such as proofreading."

[...] "When thinking about how mood affects them, many people just consider things like being grumpy, eating more ice cream, or – at best – interpreting somebody else's talk in a biased way," van Berkum said. "But there's much more going on, also in unexpected corners of our minds. That's really interesting. Imagine your laptop being more or less precise as a function of its battery level – that's unthinkable. But in human information processing, and presumably also in (information processing) of related species, something like that seems to be going on."

Journal Reference:
Vicky Tzuyin Lai, Jos van Berkum and Peter Hagoort, Negative affect increases reanalysis of conflicts between discourse context and world knowledge [open], Front. Commun, 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2022.910482 [doi.org]

Original Submission