20 Oct Everything has pros and cons…even happiness!
There's no doubt happiness is good for us in so many ways but…
…there's almost always a "but", isn't there?
Well, it's true. Pretty much everything in life has good and bad, light and shade, and happiness is not really any different. We know, for example, that happiness brings many benefits such as health and better relationships and greater chance of doing well at work and more.
But there may well be a subtle downside to happiness and positive emotions in certain contexts. Read this interesting article to learn more:
by JR Minkel from Scientific American
Despite those who romanticize depression as the wellspring of artistic genius, studies find that people are most creative when they are in a good mood, and now researchers may have explained why: For better or worse, happy people have a harder time focusing.
University of Toronto psychologists induced a happy, sad or neutral state in each of 24 participants by playing them specially chosen musical selections. To instill happiness, for example, they played a jazzy version of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. After each musical interlude, the researchers gave subjects two tests to assess their creativity and concentration.
In one test, participants in a happy mood were better able to come up with a word that unified three other seemingly disparate words, such as "mower," "atomic" and "foreign." Solving the puzzle required participants to think creatively, moving beyond the normal word associations–"lawn," "bomb" and "currency"–to come up with the more remote answer: "power."…
…keep reading the full and original article HERE