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How Feeling Affects Thinking
Emotions influence thought. Thinking cannot and does not occur without emotion. These are two fundamental principles underlying emotional intelligence. Let’s take a closer look at how different emotions direct attention and kick-start thinking.
What Does Happiness Do for Us?
Happiness helps us generate new ideas and allows us to think in new ways and to see possibilities. Happiness is about having dreams and realizing them.[1] We know that being happy actually helps us to be better at solving-inductive reasoning problems, that is, problems in which you are given a general problem and need to generate possible solutions.[2] And creative problem solving is enhanced if we are in a happy mood.[3] Happy moods result in:
More novel and creative solutions
Going beyond specific information
Thinking outside the box
Generating many ideas
Happy people often remember events in their distant past as being pleasant.[4] Being in a happy mood can also make people feel more giving, charitable, and friendly. Work by Alice Isen has found, as we noted earlier, that inducing a positive mood enhances people’s decision-making abilities.[5] This means that an “up” mood is key to successful brainstorming, generating new ideas, and expanding your list of alternatives. People who are in a positive or happy mood tend to rely on general knowledge structures. Happy people tend to cluster information more than people in a negative or sad mood. They rely more on generalized plans and processes (or schemas) than on details.[6] What this means is that big-picture thinking may be enhanced when you are feeling happy. If you are discussing a vision that you have for a new product, for instance, and you are in a happy mood while a colleague is feeling sad, you will not be on the same wavelength. You clearly have the long term and the big picture in mind, and your colleague is seeing details and not connecting the dots. However, there is a downside to happy moods. They often result-in a greater number of problem-solving errors.[7] The difficulty with a happy mood is that it signals that we have done well and succeeded in our task. We may, as a result, think that our job is complete, and we stop trying to solve the problem further.
What Does Fear Do for Us?
We become wary when we are fearful. Our senses can be heightened, and adrenaline pumps through our body. We are mobilized and ready to get the heck out of there! Fear motivates escape from danger. When fear becomes intense, we can become paralyzed by it and immobilized.[8] Anyone who has ever had a job probably knows that fear is no stranger at work, so why would anyone suggest that fear does something good for us? (Note that we’re not endorsing the behavior of managers who use fear as a tactical weapon, intimidating people, bullying them, and getting their way.) Fear is not a great feeling, but mild fear may be just what the doctor should order when we need to consider what could go wrong with our sales forecast or our new-product strategy. Fear gives us a style of thinking where everything and everyone is suspect. Harnessed properly, fear allows us to revisit our old assumptions, and we see new things in the familiar.[9]
What Does Sadness Do for Us?
People in a sad mood will likely view the world in these ways:[10]
Negative events have stable causes.
Negative events are due to global issues.
Negative events will continue.
Negative events will likely happen to them.
This is a depressing view of the world and one that is difficult to live with, if it’s your dominant mood. Yet sadness can help us solve a certain type of problem: deductive reasoning problems.[11] These are problems in which we need to focus on the details, look for something wrong in a set of facts that have already been provided for us. Bringing the mood of the group down a notch or two before they seal the deal may help them consider problems that they had previously ignored in their upbeat, brainstorming session. Most coaches will tell you that their teams can potentially learn more from a loss than they can from a win. Losing can be instructive because it makes us somewhat disappointed and sad. We see where we went wrong and note problems we had not previously observed. At the same time, losing is instructive only if the feelings of sadness that it generates are used intelligently by the team’s leader.
What Does Anger Do for Us?
If we consider the devastation wrought by anger, it would be hard to imagine that it has any place whatsoever in the development of a good manager or an effective leader. We’ve worked for angry people, and it’s not a whole lot of fun. Problems with anger are all too common, and anger management or violence prevention programs have been implemented by many companies. We are hesitant to suggest that anger has its place in the emotional tool-kit of the effective manager. But there are times when our feelings of injustice need to be roused, when we must protect our intellectual property, trademarks, copyrights, market intelligence, and human capital from the grasping hand of an unsavory competitor. If we are smart enough to be able to perceive others accurately, then there will be real and meaningful threats. The world is not a fair place; it is not completely populated by honest, law-abiding citizens. When should we be angry? How about when retirees lose their life savings to a scam artist, when pension funds are picked clean by unscrupulous fund managers, when our boss promotes his good buddy over an obviously more qualified person? What does anger do? Anger narrows our field of vision, our view of the world, and it focuses and targets our energy on a perceived threat.[12] It gives us the energy and the focus we sometimes need to right a wrong, not to right a perceived wrong but a legitimate injustice.
What Does Surprise Do for Us?
Darwin probably said it best: “As surprise is excited by something unexpected or unknown, we naturally desire, when startled, to perceive the cause as quickly as possible; and we consequently open our eyes fully so that the field of vision may be increased, and the eyeballs moved easily in any direction.”[13]
Consider the case of a product manager who is convinced that nobody else will have the competitive advantages that his new product has. Scanning the daily industry news reports, he reads a press release about a new product with most of the features of his product, plus a few even more useful features, at a lower price. Surprise! Surprise reorients our attention when something unexpected happens. We get into information-seeking mode when surprised. Our complacency is disturbed, and we’re all ears, or perhaps it would be better to say all eyes. [1]Fredrickson, B. L. “The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology: The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions.” American Psychologist, 2001, 56, 218–226. [2]Isen, A. M., Daubman, Kimberly A., and Nowicki, Gary P. “Positive Affect Facilitates Creative Problem Solving.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1987, 52, 1122–1131. [3]Bless, H. “Mood and the Use of General Knowledge Structures.” In L. L. Martin and G. L. Clore (eds.), Theories of Mood and Cognition: A User’s Guidebook. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2001. [4]Lyubomirsky, S., and Tucker, K. L. “Implications of Individual Differences in Subjective Happiness for Perceiving, Interpreting, and Thinking About Life Events.” Motivation and Emotion, 1998, 22, 155–186; Seidlitz, L., and Diener, E. “Memory for Positive Versus Negative Life Events: Theories for the Differences Between Happy and Unhappy Persons.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1993, 64, 654–663. [5]Isen, A. M., Daubman, K. A., and Nowicki, G. P. “Positive Affect Facilitates Creative Problem Solving.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1987, 52, 1122–1131. [6]Bless, H. “Mood and the Use of General Knowledge Structures.” In L. L. Martin and G. L. Clore (eds.), Theories of Mood and Cognition: A User’s Guidebook. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2001. [7]Clore, G. L., Wyer, R. S., Jr., Dienes, B., Gasper, K., Gohm, C., and Isbell, L. “Affective Feelings as Feedback: Some Cognitive Consequences.” In L. L. Martin and G. L. Clore (eds.), Theories of Mood and Cognition: A User’s Guidebook. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2001. [8]LeDoux, J. “Fear and the Brain: Where Have We Been, and Where Are We Going?” Biological Psychiatry, 1998, 44, 1229–1238. [9]DeSteno, D., Petty, R. E., Wegener, D. T., and Rucker, D. D. “Beyond Valence in the Perception of Likelihood: The Role of Emotion Specificity.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000, 78, 397–416. [10]Gillham, J. E., Shatte, A. J., Reivich, K. J., and Seligman, M.E.P. “ Optimism, Pessimism, and Explanatory Style.” In E. C. Chang (ed.), Optimism and Pessimism: Implications for Theory, Research, and Practice. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2001. [11]Palfai, T. P., and Salovey, P. “The Influence of Depressed and Elated Mood on Deductive and Inductive Reasoning.” Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 1993, 13, 57–71. [12]Van Honk, J., Tuiten, A., de Haan, E., van den Hout, M., and Stam, H. “Attentional Biases for Angry Faces: Relationships to Trait Anger and Anxiety.” Cognition and Emotion, 2001, 15, 279–297. [13]Darwin, C. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. (Definitive edition with introduction, afterword, and commentaries by Paul Ekman). New York: Oxford University, 1998. (Originally published 1872.)
