This is the Season

There is nothing like a bad mood, overall sadness and thinking negatively to make the final week and a half of your Christmas shopping productive. These conditions will help you devise the information strategies required to judge others and boost your memory, abilities you need to select the most suitable gifts for your family and friends.

This is one of the findings – without any reference to Christmas shopping, of course – of Joseph Forgas, psychology professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia. Negative moods trigger more careful thinking, he found, and greater attention to the external world than positive moods. On the other hand, for the creativity, flexibility and reliance on mental shortcuts, i.e., for the conditions required for the early stages of Christmas shopping, a good mood will help you more.

These findings were published in the November/December edition of the Australian Science Journal, and reprinted in The National Post.

Forgas and his team conducted several experiments that started with inducing happy or sad moods in their subjects by watching films and recalling positive or negative events.

People in a bad mood were also less likely to make snap decisions based on racial or religious prejudices, and they were less likely to make mistakes when asked to recall an event they had witnessed.

This was Professor Forgas’ conclusion:

“A positive mood is not universally desirable. People in a negative mood are less prone to judgmental errors, are more resistant to eyewitness distortions and are better at producing high-quality, effective persuasive messages.”