A two-minute film of penguins is a sure-fire way to improve a person’s mood. There’s something about penguins slip-sliding on the ice that seems to make everyone smile, a fact that psychologists have put to good use in their laboratory investigations of mood.
Moods, and bad moods in particular, often appear to come from nowhere. We all have a tendency to notice the negative feelings rather than the positive feelings, but the good news is that we are happier than we tend to think. When a leading Canadian psychologist asked people to keep a diary of every mood they experienced throughout the day, it was the negative moods that predominated. But when he paged the people at random intervals and asked them how they were feeling at that exact moment, it was clear that they felt good most of the time.
Moods are not just feelings we experience; they affect the way our minds work. When we are feeling happy we notice a lot of what’s going on around us, but the moment anxiety strikes our attention nar-rows. If you’re phobic about spiders, once you realise you’re in a room with a spider, you focus on that and disregard almost everything else.
Moods even influence the way we retrieve memo-ries. A person feeling sad finds it easier to remem-ber other sad occasions, while a happy person remembers other happy times. This can make it hard to shake off a bad mood. While you sit fuming with anger that a friend of yours has upset you, happy events do not tend to pop into your head. Instead you are more likely to think of other times when friends have let you down.
Hope -the feeling that good things might happen in the future – is so powerful that it can even affect our health. Hope gives us energy, and research has shown that hopeful people are more likely to suc-ceed in work, in sport, in academia and in politics. They are also happier and better at both persever-ing with a task and solving problems.
Positive emotions have clear and tangible benefits -hope can even make you live longer. But however destructive they seem, even temper tantrum s and sulks have their uses. Emotions are all about com-munication. They give us information about the way other people feel. If no one ever got angry with you or stopped talking to you, you might never know you had upset them.
Looking at the research on moods, it is clear that we don’t need to be afraid of our negative emo-tions. We imagine that it’s essential to get control of our bad moods, and it’s true that emotional man-agement is a crucial part of our personal develop-ment and relationships. But there is another aspect to our emotional ups and downs: our feelings have important things to tell us, and we do well to listen to them.