The upside of feeling down

[Michaelangelica]

SPECIAL FEATURE - The upside of feeling down

By Joe Forgas

November 7, 2009

Joe Forgas Scientia Professor Joe Forgas

 

A chill wind chases you into the door of your local newsagent. Rain is drumming down outside. As you pay for your newspaper, you briefly notice a number of strange items on the checkout counter - a matchbox car, plastic toy animals and some trinkets that seem out of place in this shop.

 

As you brace yourself to head back out into the weather, a young woman approaches you. She introduces herself as a psychologist, explains that she's conducting research on memory and poses a surprise question: how many of the unusual objects on the checkout counter can you remember?

 

Our research team conducted just such a study recently: we did so under carefully controlled conditions, repeatedly going to the same store at the same time of day, with the same checkout operator and the same objects placed in the same order on the counter. Customers were chosen at random.

 

You might expect that, on average, you'd get pretty much the same result each day. Yet our surprise question yielded a surprise answer: people performed much better on the memory test when the weather was unpleasant and they were in a slightly negative mood. On bright sunny days, when they were more likely to be happy and carefree, they flunked it.

 

So why should we be better at remembering everyday details when we are in a bad mood than when we are in a good mood? This is not a trivial question and it has important ramifications. A happy eyewitness, for example, may be less reliable in court than a sad one. Or would you perform better in an exam if you were feeling a little down?

 

Surprisingly, we still know relatively little about the subtle ways that feelings and moods influence how people think. Yet the fascinating interplay between thought and feeling - the rational and emotional ways of dealing with the world around us - has intrigued philosophers, writers, artists and ordinary people since the dawn of civilisation.

Fleeting moods can have profound influences

SPECIAL FEATURE - The upside of feeling down - News - UNSW - Science

good article worth aread

other observations

Sadness may promote a more attentive, accommodating thinking style

Happy people tend to make snap judgements

We asked people to judge the probable truth of urban legends

People who are sad by nature may be better at detecting some types of lies

Happy people are more confident, despite being less accurate

Sad people had better recall of a tense scene

Sad people made better arguments and were more persuasive

Are memories and judgements biased by how you feel at the time?

SPECIAL FEATURE - The upside of feeling down - News - UNSW - Science

* The author is Scientia Professor, School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. His personal homepage is here.

[lemit]

I can think of a couple of possible explanations. First, struggling against the weather might have your defense mechanisms active, including your powers of observation. Second, the contrast between a dark, dreary world and the bright, pleasant shop might open your eyes up to the contents of the shop, while the contents of the shop would not stand out in contrast if it were the shop that was dark, as it would seem on a sunny day.

 

Just some suggestions. I find perceptions fascinating. Anybody else? Or is this a dark little thread in the midst of bright, sunny climate change threads?

 

--lemit

[Michaelangelica]

This seems relevant to this research

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo&feature=channel

[wendy reakes]

When it's raining, our mental ability slows down because bad weather depresses us, and because our power of thought has more time, we see and recollect more.

 

When its sunny, our minds are thinking about how sunny it is and how happy that makes us, so all other observations become secondary and less distinctive.

 

Don't we, as adults, always remember our school summer holidays as never raining?

 

Bear in mind I live in the UK. I don't know how i would explain it if I lived in California.

 

What would be the outcome of this test, if one group lived in sunny California and the other in Seattle?

[joekgamer]

Think of a movie in which a tense scene was interrupted by something utterly rediculous.

 

Did you laugh when it happened?

 

After a dull, weary, rainy day, seeing something very incongruous is similar.

 

Ergo, it is remembered, due to its incongruacy.

 

Perhaps this is some sort of defence mechanism.