The latest issue of Cognition & Emotion (Volume 27,Issue 4) just came out and I received the abstracts by email. I have not read the entire papers (yet), but
even the abstracts have some fascinating results that I thought I would share
today. If you trust my quick
interpretations, it could save you from having to go find the papers yourself.
Here is the first one:
In general, our thinking is often strongly impacted by the
mood we are in. I am sure this resonates
with your own experience. Being in a
good mood changes the way we look at otherwise neutral events. Same with being in a bad mood. Even if the mood is totally unrelated to what
you are doing. How often have you
snapped at someone for no reason just because you are in a bad mood? Or done something nice for someone for no
reason except that you are feeling good?
Most of the time, this probably doesn’t make much of a
difference. But other times, like big decisions
at work, driving, or whatever, we really want to suppress the effects of our
mood and just make the best decision possible.
A paper by Riemer and Viswanathan finds some new wrinkles in
this. They found that when we are making
decisions based on things we see in the outside world, we are better at
suppressing the effects of these strong moods when we are not very motivated by
whatever we are deciding on. On the
other hand, when we are making judgments based on things we are accessing from
our memories, we are better at suppressing the strong mood when we are highly
motivated by the decision.
I have several thoughts on why this might be true, but I
want to read the entire paper before jumping to any conclusions. What do you think?
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