KEY POINTS:
If you're preparing for a brain-storming session and want the creative juices to flow, you might want to put on some uplifting music, a new study suggests.
But if you need sharp focus, you are better off scared.
A group of Canadian researchers looking into how moods affect our mental processes found that a good mood appears to enhance your ability to think laterally, or outside the box.
Conversely, they suspect that the tunnel vision associated with fear and anxiety can be an asset when it comes to tasks requiring close attention to detail.
The underlying mechanisms are still unclear, but in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers suggest the phenomenon may have something to do with the way our mood affects the way we process information.
"We think the underlying mechanism is selection, the way in which we filter information," said Adam Anderson, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto in Canada and author of the study.
"If attention is like a spotlight, then a good mood will widen that spotlight, while a negative mood will focus it very tightly."
To test his theory, Professor Anderson studied how a group of 24 university students fared on two tasks - one a creative problem requiring unusual word associations and the other a visual task that required the volunteers to ignore distracting information.
The volunteers performed the tasks several times - in a positive, negative and neutral mood. The researchers set the mood with music: a jazzy version of Bach's Brandenberg Concerto No 3 to induce a good mood and Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky's Russia under the Mongolian Yoke at half speed to induce a negative mood.
For a neutral mood, the researchers recited a list of statistics about Canada.
On the word association or problem-solving task, a self-rated positive mood improved performance, but it impaired performance on the visual test, with individuals in a happy state more easily distracted by peripheral cues than those in a sad state.
"When people are in a good mood, they tend to have a very open filter, which fosters a global or intuitive type of thinking," Professor Anderson said.
"A wide filter helps with the word association game because you take into account a lot of information, but that kind of broad or diffuse attention can be detrimental in situations that demand a laser-like focus," he said.
Professor Anderson said different moods enhance performance in different ways, "and intense concentration may not be the best tool for problem-solving.
"If you're having a tough time problem-solving, it might be wiser to stop ... and indulge in some playful activity and then try again."
- AFP
