Unfortunately, these judgments can often be wrong, in part because of a number of shortcuts and biases that can lead us astray. Humans constantly make social judgments, trying to read social cues in order to understand and predict others’ thoughts and behaviors. Research like ours consistently finds that happiness can produce less focused and attentive processing and so increases the chances of misleading information being incorporated into memory, while a negative mood improves attention to detail and results in better memory. So, being in the right mood can help improve our recollections. It seems that negative mood reduces the likelihood that later false information will distort the original memory. This experiment points to a basic psychological fact: What we remember about the past can be greatly altered by subsequent misinformation. We later tested their eyewitness memory, and found that participants in a negative mood were better able to accurately remember original details, ignoring misleading information, while participants in positive moods made more mistakes. They then received some questions about the photos, that were manipulated so that the questions either did or did not contain misleading or false information, such as “Did you see the stop sign at the scene?”-when there was no stop sign, only a yield sign. Later, we asked participants to recall happy or sad memories from their past, in order to shift their mood. In another experiment, my colleagues and I showed participants a photo of either a car crash scene or a wedding party scene.
It seems that positive mood impairs, and negative mood improves attention and memory for incidental details in our environment. On bright, sunny days when people felt happy their memory was far less accurate in an identical situation. In one field study, we found that on rainy, unpleasant days that produce bad mood people had a much better recollection of details of objects they had seen in a shop. Though happiness is still desirable in many situations, there are others in which a mild sad mood confers important advantages. With the advent of fMRI imaging and the proliferation of brain research, scientists have begun to find out more about how sadness works in the brain and influences our thoughts and behavior. Yet, while other so-called “negative emotions,” like fear, anger, and disgust, seem clearly adaptive-preparing our species for flight, fight, or avoidance, respectively-the evolutionary benefits of sadness have been harder to understand…until recently, that is. Being sad from time to time serves some kind of purpose in helping our species to survive. Self-help books promote the benefits of positive thinking, positive attitude, and positive behaviors, labeling sadness as a “problem emotion” that needs to be kept at bay or eliminated.Įvolution must have had something else in mind, though, or sadness wouldn’t still be with us. Sadness is not usually valued in our current culture.
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