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By: Elle Freedman and Wendy Carballo<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cOh, so you study psychology at Harvard? Does that mean you can read my mind?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n No psychology concentrator at Harvard has escaped this inevitable conversation. What if instead of the typical eye-roll response, you tell them \u201cactually, reading minds isn\u2019t a skill reserved for psych majors. Making inferences about what someone else is thinking is crucial for forming social connections and navigating everyday life.\u201d Either they\u2019ll get an unnecessary ego-boost or ask you to explain mentalization and the theory of mind.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Mind perception consists of two components, mind detection and mentalizing. Mind detection is simply the notion of identifying another entity with a mind. Mentalizing, or theory of mind, is the ability to infer thoughts, feelings, and desires from other people. Mentalizing allows us to humanize, connect with others, and synchronize behavior to strengthen relationships. But what happens when one\u2019s personal feelings and biases get in the way of mentalization? Can your internal emotions affect your ability to mentalize, possibly over-mentalize, and perhaps become blind to lies and deception? Does seeing the world through rose-colored glasses improve our relationships, or set us up for failure?<\/span><\/p>\n Wendy: Being Happy Can Turn a Blind Eye to Reality\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n In 2008, researchers Joseph Forgas and Rebekah East made an attempt to illuminate these questions by studying the effect of mood on skepticism and the detection of deception. Specifically, they set up a blind experiment in which undergraduate students were randomly assigned to watch either a neutral, positive, or a negative film meant to induce a happy, neutral, or a sad mood, respectively. After watching the videos, participants were asked to watch multiple clips of males and females who were either honest or deceptive during their testimony of an alleged theft. Finally, to confirm the intended mood-induction, participants took a survey in which they rated their feelings based on a<\/span> good-bad<\/span><\/i> and a <\/span>happy-sad<\/span><\/i> scale.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The results of this study were insightful. As indicated by the scales, it was found that participants who were in the happy mood condition experienced significantly more positive feelings compared to those in the neutral and negative mood conditions. Conversely, participants in the negative mood condition experienced significantly more negative feelings compared to those in the neutral and happy mood conditions which affirms the experimenter\u2019s ability to control mood affect. Moreover, consistent with their hypothesis, participants in the happy mood condition reported greater judgements of innocence regarding the theft testimonies, while participants in the sad mood condition reported greater judgements of guilt. Happy and neutral participants failed to distinguish between innocent and guilty targets, showing that mood has a greater influence on guilt judgments of deception than truthful communications.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n These findings have some intriguing implications regarding mentalization and our interpersonal relationships. Specifically, the idea that experiencing happy moods can hinder our ability to detect lies and lead to false judgments of other people\u2019s actions suggests that positive feelings can hinder our mentalization skills. Conversely, experiencing sad or negative moods can enhance our ability to detect deception and hence read other people\u2019s minds.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Elle: Emotion and the Fundamental Attribution Theory<\/b><\/p>\n Furthermore, a positive mood goes hand in hand with the fundamental attribution error. Forgas and Wyland\u2019s book <\/span>Emotional Intelligence in Everyday Life <\/span><\/i>pools together various studies that affirm the way one feels is inseparable from our cognition and how we subsequently act and make social judgements. In one study, Forgas asked happy or sad people to observe and rate their own and their partner\u2019s behaviors in a videotaped social encounter. The experiment involved conditioning the emotional affect of either happy or sad moods, and then rewatching a video tape of a previous interaction with them and their experimental partners. The group conditioned to be happy \u201csaw\u201d more positive, skilled and fewer negative, unskilled behaviors in themselves and in their partners than did sad subjects (Forgas and Wyland 2006). This is consistent with the idea that people pay attention to affect-consistent rather than affect-inconsistent information, and that can have major implications in the way that we try to make sense of complex and inherently ambiguous social behaviors, which is the underlying mechanics of mentalization.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This has direct relevance to the fundamental attribution error, which is the tendency to overestimate the importance of dispositional factors (individual characteristics that influence behavior, like personality traits and temperament) when forming impressions on others, and to underestimate the importance of the situation that the observed behavior is occurring (O\u2019Sullivan). Forgas put the question of temporary mood\u2019s influence on the occurrence of the fundamental attribution error to the test in a single study of three separate experiments. In the first experiment, participants were conditioned to have either a happy or sad temporary mood and then read an essay and make judgments about the writer. The results showed that happy mood emphasized dispositional inferences over all other stimuli, which resulted in committing the fundamental attribution error, despite being controlled for coercive behaviors. Conversely, the group that was manipulated to have a temporary bad mood gave more weight to external stimuli, therefore being more situationally analytical in their inferences (Forgas 323). Essentially, the group manipulated to be happy was more likely to agree and positively rate a highly popular and coercive essay, whereas the sad group was much more stringent on their judgements and did not fall into the persuasive content of the essays. Negative moods decrease and positive moods increase the FAE because of the information processing consequences of these affective states (Forgas 318). Sad people are less likely to be fooled and coerced, whereas happy people are easily convinced and susceptible to other people\u2019s opinions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So are you telling me that being sad will improve my mentalizing skills and I\u2019ll make more friends?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Not necessarily! Positive and negative moods both have their advantages and disadvantages in social behavior. In regards to mind perception and mentalization, however, these studies raise the thought that it might be advantageous to be a bit more skeptical in judging social cues, and having a negative mood emphasizes situational factors in judgements rather than dispositional. So, mentalizing and forming social bonds is deeper than just recognizing other\u2019s conscious experiences and trying to infer- your own mind and mood could be influencing how you interpret the actions of others and subsequently how you connect with them. The best thing to do may be to just wipe the dust and fog off your glasses before you put them back on!<\/span><\/p>\n So then, what does this say about our ability to socialize and create connections? Should we monitor our moods in the presence of others? If you\u2019re a social butterfly or an extrovert, this information has surely shaken your world as our ability to make friends is greatly dependent on our ability to understand others\u2019 thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Surely if one has high energy and thrives in the social scene, then chances are that one is more gullible and less able to understand other people\u2019s minds, correct? Not quite.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n While our judgment skills are certainly influenced by our feelings and emotions, positive feelings towards social interactions need not be mutually exclusive with mentalization and social connection. As Waytz and Epley (2011) underlined in their paper about the effect of social connection on dehumanization, feeling socially connected or satiated can lessen our desire for more relationships and thus lead to the dehumanization of distant others. (Dehumanization, in this context, meaning a decreased practice of mentalization or attribution of human characteristics to others). This would imply then that we can create social connections by putting on our mentalization hats and actively attempting to understand others. Through these lenses, positive feelings in the presence of others need not decrease our ability to read others\u2019 minds but instead motivate us to do so. In other words, we just need a desire to connect and mindfully pursue it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n References\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Forgas, J. P., & Wyland, C. L. (2006). Affective intelligence: Understanding the role of affect in everyday social behavior. <\/span>Emotional intelligence in everyday life<\/span><\/i>, 77-99.<\/span><\/p>\n Forgas. (1998). On Being Happy and Mistaken. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(2), 318\u2013331. <\/span>https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1037\/0022-3514.75.2.318<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n