14 DAY TRIAL // Israeli researchers at the Tel Aviv University (TAU) have demonstrated in a new study that people can avoid getting into a bad mood by repeatedly exposing themselves to, and dwelling on, negative events.
Previous studies have shown that witnessing something bad happening, seeing it on TV, or even reading on it, can have a negative effect of the human mind. Even basic cognitive abilities, such as writing, counting, thinking and speech can be impaired.
As such, TAU researchers hypothesized that repeated exposure to negative events and news would naturally put people into an even deeper bad mood. Counter-intuitively, they discovered that such reoccurring exposure generates a type of protective effect on the brain that cancels bad mood.
Details of the new study were published in a recent issue of the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. The work was led by investigator Moshe Shay Ben-Haim, PhD, from the TAU School of Psychological Sciences.
“A bad mood is known to slow cognition. We show that, counterintuitively, you can avoid getting into a bad mood in the first place by dwelling on a negative event,” Ben-Haim explains. In the study, test subjects' emotional states were evaluated using the emotional Stroop task, which is a standard test for this type of investigations.
“If you look at the newspaper before you go to work and see a headline about a bombing or tragedy of some kind, it’s better to read the article all the way through and repeatedly expose yourself to the negative information,” the researcher adds.
“You will be freer to go on with your day in a better mood and without any negative effects,” he says.
This study could hold great implications for our understanding of how the human mind processes emotions and cues in the environment, and of how it underlies attention-related processes. Additional studies in this field could also lead to a deeper understanding of condition such as depression and anxiety.
In the future, these results may constitute the foundation of new therapies against both of these mental disorders, and potentially others as well, PsychCentral reports.