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This article talks about how music is able to affect our mood. It is said that even sad music is able to lift someone's mood. However, sometimes sad music can also make people feel negative feelings. Also people who listened to happy or upbeat music were able to lift their moods in just two weeks

The problem of looking at our devices nonstop is physiological and social. The average human head weighs between 10 and 12 pounds, and when we bend our neck to use digital devices, the gravitational pull on our head and the stress on our neck increases to as much as 60 pounds of pressure. That common position leads to incremental loss of the curve of the cervical spine. Posture has been proven to affect mood, behavior and memory, and frequent slouching can make us depressed, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information. The way we stand affects everything from the amount of energy we have to bone and muscle development, and even the amount of oxygen our lungs can take in. A study in 2010 found that adolescents ages 8 to 18 spent more than 7.5 hours a day consuming media. In 2015, the Pew Research Center reported that 24 percent of teenagers are "almost constantly" online. Adults aren't any better: Most adults spend 10 hours a day or more consuming electronic media, according to a Nielsen's Total Audience Report from last year. "Mobile devices are the mother of inattentional blindness," said Henry Alford, the author of "Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That: A Modern Guide to Manners." "That's the state of monomaniacal obliviousness that overcomes you when you're absorbed in an activity to the exclusion of everything else." Children now compete with their parents' devices for attention, resulting in a generation afraid of the spontaneity of a phone call or face-to-face interaction. Eye contact now seems to be optional, Dr. Turkle suggests, and sensory overload can often mean our feelings are constantly anesthetized. Researchers at the University of Michigan claim empathy levels have plummeted while narcissism is skyrocketing, with emotional development, confidence and health all affected

Study Sheds Light on Whether the Sun, Wind, Rain Sway Our Emotions

This article covers a very interesting phenomena; as the national mood changes, the vocabulary people use adjusts to fit the mood. There are a few theories for why this happens- maybe, they say, it's because we're social creatures, and affirmative language promotes group bonding and cooperation. Maybe we inherently privilege positive information. Maybe, optimistically, more good things than bad things happen overall, and the words we use reflect that.

mood and social media

Interesting video on how using social media in different ways can affect mood positively / negatively. Specifically passive versus active use of social media.

Although an opinion piece, this New York Times article, written by Arthur C. Brooks, cites several studies talking about how actively practicing gratitude can positively bolster our mood and outlook.

In this article they talk about how certain words can dampen the effect of negative emotions. Furthermore they talk about how talking about how you feel can often improve your mood.

In relation to the current election that just passed, it was pretty obvious that there was a huge disconnect between two opposing sides. Words of frustration and anger flooded newsprints and social media. In the past, researchers found that there was a curious phenomenon in known as "positive feedback", which refers to people's tendency to use more positive words than negative words. In recent years, Google Books and the New York Times partnered to disprove this phenomenon. Both major print companies forged through tons of texts and found that 16.2 million of those texts contained negative language. They also found that negative words were used more frequently during times of unemployment, poverty, inflation rates, wartime casualties and political tension. More research has been conducted by psychological scientist including William Hamilton and Mark Liberman. Shockingly, they found that events like these were being triggered more often and positive language has decreased in the last 200 years.

Listening to music while studying can be helpful for many different reasons. Since music can affect your mood, if you listen to relaxing music it can prevent you from becoming stressed while studying. Music can also help to block out other distractions while studying, especially in busy or loud environments.

Although it has a genetic component, most believe perfect pitch - or absolute pitch - is a primarily a function of early life exposure and training in music, says Takao Hensch, professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard. Hensch is studying valprioc acid, a drug which might allow adults to learn perfect pitch by re-creating this critical period in brain development. "It's a mood-stabilizing drug, but we found that it also restores the plasticity of the brain to a juvenile state," Hensch says. Valprioc acid allows the brain to absorb new information as easily as it did before age 7. Hensch's findings have potentially valuable implications for other critical-period-related developments, language being one. So the sci-fi question: in the future, can we come up with a way to reopen plasticity, [and] paired with the appropriate training, allow adult brains to become young again?

"Music stimulates various parts of the brain, making it an effective therapeutic or mood-altering tool." I totally agree with that statement and it is also said that 80% of students do homework and study while listening to music. I find that slower pace songs don't distract people as much as fast paced and up-beat songs do.

Have you ever experienced mind-numbing cold? Or have you ever felt like it was so hot you could barely think? Believe it or not, these expressions are more than just idioms. Research shows that shifts in core body temperature caused by extreme heat or cold can have significant effects not only on mood but also on cognition.

Baby's communicate through emotions. Fun video of twin babies communicating with babbling (ie secret language of twins).

Article abstract: Writing about traumatic, stressful or emotional events has been found to result in improvements in both physical and psychological health, in non-clinical and clinical populations. In the expressive writing paradigm, participants are asked to write about such events for 15-20 minutes on 3-5 occasions. Those who do so generally have significantly better physical and psychological outcomes compared with those who write about neutral topics. Here we present an overview of the expressive writing paradigm, outline populations for which it has been found to be beneficial and discuss possible mechanisms underlying the observed health benefits. In addition, we suggest how expressive writing can be used as a therapeutic tool for survivors of trauma and in psychiatric settings. This article provides a succinct review of relevant studies in this area, from 20 years ago to the present.

Although this url may seem absurd to be talking about 7 rules of texting, it is sadly very true. It's crazy how words/texting can change one's mood in an instant depending on punctuation and length of a certain text. Just like in the movie Catfish, I realized that many people get tricked into online relationships because of certain texting strategies that lure people in. Short, sweet, and to the point messages can easily hook someone's attention.

Research shows that under some conditions, music actually improves our performance, while in other situations music makes it worse - sometimes dangerously so. Absorbing and remembering new information is best done with the music off, suggests a 2010 study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology. Nick Perham, the British researcher who conducted the study, notes that playing music you like can lift your mood and increase your arousal - if you listen to it before getting down to work. But it serves as a distraction from cognitively demanding tasks. Music might enhance performance if a well-practiced expert, e.g. a surgeon, needs to achieve the relaxed focus necessary to execute a job he's done many times before, but not all physicians in the operating room agree re: the benefits of music. A study of anaesthetists suggested that many felt that music distracted them from carrying out their expected tasks. Another study found that singing or listening to music while operating a simulated car increased drivers' mental workload and slowed responses to potential hazards, leading them to scan their visual field less often and to focus instead on the road right in front of them. Other iPod rules drawn from the research: Classical or instrumental music enhances mental performance more than music with lyrics. Music can make rote or routine tasks (think folding laundry or filing papers) less boring and more enjoyable. Runners who listen to music go faster. But when you need to give learning and remembering your full attention, silence is golden.

This site describes how colors affect emotions. And what colors evoke which emotions. It gives an example of when colors affects a work environment. And it describes events where this information would be applicable.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut once opined, "There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can't be fed into computers. They are beautiful shapes." Thanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done. Researchers at the University of Vermont's Computational Story Lab have analysed over 1,700 English novels to reveal six basic story types - you could call them archetypes - that form the building blocks for more complex stories. They are: 1. Rags to riches - a steady rise from bad to good fortune 2. Riches to rags - a fall from good to bad, a tragedy 3. Icarus - a rise then a fall in fortune 4. Oedipus - a fall, a rise then a fall again 5. Cinderella - rise, fall, rise 6. Man in a hole - fall, rise The researchers used sentiment analysis to get the data - a statistical technique often used by marketeers to analyse social media posts in which each word is allocated a particular 'sentiment score', based on crowdsourced data. Depending on the lexicon chosen, a word can be categorised as positive (happy) or negative (sad), or it can be associated with one or more of eight more subtle emotions, including fear, joy, surprise and anticipation. For example, the word 'happy' is positive, and associated with joy, trust and anticipation. The word 'abolish' is negative and associated with anger. Do sentiment analysis on all the words in a novel, poem or play and plot the results against time, and it's possible to see how the mood changes over the course of the text, revealing a kind of emotional narrative. While not a perfect tool - it looks at words in isolation, ignoring context - it can be surprisingly insightful when applied to larger chunks of text

Eye contact plays a bigger role in communication than previously thought. Our pupils, which we cannot control, expands or contracts based on the attractiveness of what we're looking at. Blinking speed can also tell us something. You blink faster when talking to someone you find attractive. Too much constant eye contact can make people feel uncomfortable. A reason why children are often victims of pet attacks is that they stare too long at the animal and the animal feels threatened. The best use of eye contact is regular intervals rather than constant eye contact.