Research Design Connection: Positive Moods

Diener and his team identified the mood that people are most likely to experience. And it’s slightly positive. Their work is important to designers, who are often trying to create spaces in which people feel good. Designers need to consider whether the experiences that people have in developed areas will destroy the positive mood that they likely had on entry. As the researchers report, “Evidence shows that people feel mild positive moods when no strong emotional events are occurring, a phenomenon known as positive mood offset…positive mood offset is virtually universal in the nations of the world…Positive moods increase the likelihood of the types of adaptive behaviors that likely characterized our Paleolithic ancestors, such as creativity, planning, mating, and sociality.”

Ed Diener, Satoshi Kanazawa, Eunkook Suh, and Shigehiro Oishi. “Why People Are in a Generally Good Mood.” Personality and Social Psychology Review, in press.

Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.