Those in negative moods displayed more brain activity associated with re-analysis. “We show that mood matters, and perhaps when we do some tasks, we should pay attention to our mood,” Lai explained. “If we’re in a bad mood, maybe we should do things that are more detail-oriented, such as proofreading.” (You can determine my mood when writing this post by how many typos you find in it.)
“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,” added study co-author Jos van Berkum, a psycholinguistics researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “But there’s much more going on, also in unexpected corners of our minds. 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.”
And so, if anyone asks, you’re not angry, you’re just trying out the latest productivity hack.
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