Sad people have better memory than happier ones

Past studies have found that unhappiness is often detrimental to a wide range of mental tasks,such as abstract thinking and remembering lists of words.

To learn more about how sadness might affect thinking,a team at the Anglia Ruskin University in England carried out experiments on college students involving face recognition.

The researchers put volunteers into happy,sad or neutral moods by having them listen to suitable music — for instance,Mozart’s “Requiem” for sadness,the theme from “The A-Team” for happiness,and the soundtrack for the movie “The Hunt for Red October” for a neutral mood.

Participants were also asked to remember the happiest or saddest moments in their lives,or,for a neutral mood,their journey from home to the university.

In one experiment,88 undergraduates were shown 32 faces with neutral expressions,then given a questionnaire as a brief distraction,then shown a sequence of 64 faces and asked to identify the ones they first saw.

The volunteers primed to feel sad turned out to be the most accurate,and the happy ones the least accurate.

“I was surprised,” said study researcher Peter Hills,a cognitive psychologist at Anglia Ruskin University in England. “Sad mood is usually associated with poorer performance in cognitive tasks.”