When we are in a good mood, things always seem to go better for us. It is known that when our mood is positive, our motivation increases and our attention is even modulated, and now it seems that positive mood can also improve our performance in tasks of a type of memory called working memory.
Briefly, we can define working memory as a mental capacity that allows us to keep active, as ‘online’, the information we need to solve a specific problem, manipulate it and update it in a temporary store.
A study by Annette Brose of the Max Planc Institute for Human Development in Berlin and her collaborators shows us how cognitive performance on some working memory tasks was boosted when participants in their work reported being positive.
One of the objectives of the experiment was to be able to assess the relationships between affect and cognitive performance considering the small mood changes that one can have from one day to the next. For this, they had the collaboration of 101 people who were assigned to carry out three types of working memory tasks and asked them to report every day about their mood and their motivation to work on the tasks.
The results, recently published in the journal Emotion (2014), showed that in two of the working memory tasks, performance was higher when the participants valued their positive affect above the average. In addition, this improvement in the execution of the tests was positively related to the motivation to perform the exercises. The data support the idea that when you feel good, you perform better in tasks that require a lot of cognitive resources. The simplest conclusion is that you have to try to maintain a positive mood to perform better in your daily mental activities.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
