Happiness doesn’t always conquer everything. UVA psychology professor Vikram Jaswal and colleagues at the University of Plymouth in England studied children there and found that happy children don’t perform as well as sad children. With the help of video clips from The Lion King and The Jungle Book and the music of Mozart and Mahler, the researchers tested how a group of children’s state of mind related to their ability to perform detail-oriented tasks. Jaswal, who is also director of UVA’s Child Language and Learning Lab, discusses the surprising findings.
 “We certainly do not want to suggest that children should be made to feel sad before going to school or before taking an exam,” says Vikram Jaswal. |
C-VILLE: What did your research find about children’s moods?
Vikram Jaswal: We found that 6- and 7-year-olds and 10- and 11-year-olds who were “induced” into a happy mood had more difficulty locating a shape hidden within a larger figure than those who were induced into a sad or neutral mood. Moods were induced by having children watch a short clip from an animated film or by playing a piece of music in the background while they searched for the hidden shape.
What has been the overall consensus about children and happiness before your study?
It seems like happy children should make the best learners. In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that when creative thinking is required, happiness may be optimal. But even before our study, there was evidence that happiness is not always optimal in adults and there were some hints that happiness may have a hidden cost in children as well.
What does this research mean for child development research?
Emotions tell us something important! Negative emotions signal that something is not right—paying attention to details might help us to figure out how to change the situation to make it better. In contrast, positive emotions indicate that things are going well—if things are going well, we may not need to exert the effort to analyze the situation in detail.
It is important to keep in mind that the style of thinking triggered by happiness has been shown in other research to be beneficial in children, and adults, when creativity or thinking about the “big picture” is required. What our study shows is that artificially inflating a child’s mood may make it harder for them to pay attention to details, which could be important in many school contexts.
How about children who are neither happy nor sad?
One important finding is that children in a neutral mood did just as well as those in a sad mood. We certainly do not want to suggest that children should be made to feel sad before going to school or before taking an exam.
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