A Bad Mood Career Boost?
By Melanie Joy Douglas, Monster.ca 
Wake up on the wrong side of bed in the morning? Stuck in horrible traffic on your way to work? It could just be the career boost you’ve been looking for!
A new study suggests that being in a bad mood can actually put you in the perfect mindset to be productive.
The study, by University of Toronto psychologist Adam Anderson, stipulates that while good moods can help in doing creative work, bad moods actually help in tasks requiring more focus.
Needless to say, this study is the first to suggest the potential negative impact of a positive frame of mind.
Anderson asked 24 university students to take two kinds of tests after listening to music or words to alter their mood. Music was used to get users in a happy or sad mood, and to achieve a neutral mood the researchers recited a list of facts about Canada.
In one task designed to test their scope of thinking and creativity, participants had to think of unusual words. Participants who listened to happy music and claimed to be in a better mood did better at this test, supporting previous research that claims a positive mood can increase creativity.
However, the happy workers took longer with the second test, which asked them to focus on a single letter in a row of letters. Happy-music listeners were 40% more likely than sad-music listeners to be distracted by the peripheral information.
"If attention is like a spotlight, then a good mood will widen that spotlight, while a negative mood will focus it very tightly," says psychologist Adam Anderson, author of the study. "When people are in a good mood, they tend to have a very open filter, and are more easily distracted by those around them than those in a less happy state.”
This makes sense. When we’re in a bad mood at work, we likely keep our heads down and interact as little as possible with colleagues, while a good mood brings about a more people-friendly and receptive attitude.
Anderson, a Canada research chair in cognitive neuroscience, published his findings in the Dec. 18 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.