How It Enhances Analytical Thinking
By UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
Vicky
Lai, an assistant professor of psychology and cognitive science at the
UArizona, collaborated with researchers in the Netherlands to investigate the
differences in how people’s brains respond to language when they are in a
positive versus a negative mood.
“Mood
and language seem to be supported by different brain networks. But we have one
brain, and the two are processed in the same brain, so there is a lot of
interaction going on,” Lai said. “We show that when people are in a negative
mood, they are more careful and analytical. They scrutinize what’s actually
stated in a text, and they don’t just fall back on their default world
knowledge.”
Lai and her study co-authors set out to manipulate study participants’ moods by showing them clips from a sad movie – “Sophie’s Choice” – or a funny television show – “Friends.” A computerized survey was used to evaluate participants’ moods before and after watching the clips. While the funny clips did not impact participants’ moods, the sad clips succeeded in putting participants in a more negative mood, the researchers found.
The
participants then listened to a series of emotionally neutral audio recordings
of four-sentence stories that each contained a “critical sentence” that either
supported or violated default, or familiar, word knowledge. That sentence was
displayed one word at a time on a computer screen, while participants’ brain
waves were monitored by EEG, a test that measures brain waves.
For example, the researchers presented study participants with a story about driving at night that ended with the critical sentence “With the lights on, you can see more.”
In a separate story about stargazing, the same critical sentence
was altered to read “With the lights on, you can see less.” Although that
statement is accurate in the context of stargazing, the idea that turning on
the lights would cause a person to see less is a much less familiar concept
that defies default knowledge.
The
researchers also presented versions of the stories in which the critical
sentences were swapped so that they did not fit the context of the story. For
example, the story about driving at night would include the sentence “With the
lights on, you can see less.”
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.
The
study was conducted in the Netherlands; participants were native Dutch
speakers, and the study was conducted in Dutch. But Lai believes their findings
translate across languages and cultures.
By
design, the study participants were all women, because Lai and her colleagues
wanted to align their study with existing literature that was limited to female
participants. Lai said future studies should include more diverse gender
representation.
In
the meantime, Lai and her colleagues say mood may affect us in more ways than
we previously realized.
Researcher
Jos van Berkum of the Netherlands’ Utrecht University, co-authored the study
with Lai and Peter Hagoort of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in
the Netherlands.
“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.”
Reference:
“Negative affect increases reanalysis of conflicts between discourse context
and world knowledge” by Vicky Tzuyin Lai, Jos van Berkum and Peter Hagoort, 14
December 2022, Frontiers in Communication.
DOI: 10.3389/fcomm.2022.910482