ScienceDaily: How your mood affects the way you process language

They then looked at how the brain reacted to the inconsistencies, depending on mood. They found that when participants were in a negative mood, based on their survey responses, they showed a type of brain activity closely associated with re-analysis.

"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." Study participants completed the experiment twice -- once in the negative mood condition and once in the happy mood condition. Each trial took place one week apart, with the same stories presented each time. "These are the same stories, but in different moods, the brain sees them differently, with the sad mood being the more analytical mood," Lai said.

"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."

My Takeaways:

• Our brain can have different functions and have certain types of processing amplified when we are in certain moods. Thus sometimes our mood can affect how we analyze and make conclusions about our world.

• In this particular article researchers showed that our mind is more likely to be more critical and analytical when we are in a negative mood than a positive mood. This may be good in certain situations when those skills and type of processing are necessary but who wants to be in a negative mood all the time?

• This sheds a light into the complexity of our mind and how different types of moods can affect how our brain thinks and processes information. It’s quite fascinating and perhaps something we can learn to take advantage of as research progresses.

Full article is here!

Have you ever noticed differences in your thinking when your mood changes?

#Mood #Emotions #Processing

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