The Effect Of Cognitive Load And Time Interval To Distraction From Mood

Mood is always a hot issue in psychology research, As society changes,more and more emotional problems which have often troubled modern people. Emotionregulation has become the topic of concern. The present research used the way ofcognitive emotion regulation, examined whether and how cognitive load and time intervalcan attenuate positive mood and negative mood, that is to say achieved distraction frommood. This discovery provides a new basis for cognitive emotion regulation. There weretwo experiments in present research:In experiment1, participants were exposed to strongly positive, weakly positive,neutral, weakly negative, strongly negative pictures followed by a math task and a moodscale. Cognitive load were varied by manipulating task complexity. Participants reportedless positive moods and negative moods with high compared to low cognitive load afterwatching positive and negative pictures. Cognitive load did not affect mood afterwatching neutral pictures. High load attenuated the same weakly negative mood with lowload, but high load attenuate more strongly negative mood than low load. These findingssuggest that more cognitive load and more negative degree of mood, causing moreobvious distraction. Except neutral mood, high load attenuate all other moods, but lowload can not attenuate positive mood. This is to say negative mood is more easily bedistracted than positive mood. The experiment also show that with the cognitive load andthe degree of negative emotion increasing, causing more obvious distraction.In experiment2, participants were exposed negative pictures followed by a task anda mood scale. Cognitive load is constant by using same difficult math task, but the timewas varied by manipulating task quantity. Participants reported less negative mood inlong time condition than short time condition, but they reported same negative mood inlong and medium time condition, and same negative mood in medium time and short time. These findings suggested that time interval is a important factor of distraction of mood,long time interval could cause distraction from mood, but short time interval could not.