Bad mood isn’t all that bad

If your work requires you to be more analytical and detailed, wait for your mood to get bad... as bad mood makes you efficient and a better worker

Have you ever procrastinated your work because you were in a bad mood and weren't sure if you could do justice to your work? Do you head for ice cream, chocolates or sleep when your mood is bad so that you can shut the world?

If the answer is 'yes' to both the questions, it looks like you have missed out on reaping a lot of benefits of a bad mood.

Yes, if a recent study is anything to go by, we become much more detail-oriented and careful about mistakes when we are in a bad, foul mood. The efficiency levels are especially enhanced for works that require detailing, analysing and have something to do with language such as copyediting and proofreading. So, when in a bad mood, instead of hitting the bed, we should head for work!

The research from the University of Arizona studied how people's ability to process language alters depending on how they're feeling. The team, led by Vicky Lai, an assistant professor of psychology and cognitive science, found that people were more analytical when their mood was negative and they could pick up problems with it much more quickly.

'Friends' made them efficient while sad movie lowered skills

Participants were shown two shows, one sad and another funny. While they chose popular funny TV show 'Friends' for their happy mood, sad movie 'Sophie's Choice' was chosen to analyse their negative moods.

A computerised survey was then 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.

Once Lai and her co-authors manipulated participants' moods by showing them these clips, the rest of the research followed.

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.

They found 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 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 said.

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.

Mood & language have a lot of interaction going on

While this seems like a highly unlikely result since mood and language are supported by different brain networks, the researchers say that it is not as simple as it looks.

"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," said Professor Lai.

"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," said researcher Van Berkum of the Netherlands' Utrecht University, who co-authored the study with Lai and Peter Hagoort of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.

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.