Although we may take pride in ourselves as rational beings, decisions are not made with rationality alone; they depend on the interplay of emotions and thinking. In fact, as neuroscientist Damasio notes, “Appropriate emotions speed up decision-making enormously.”
How Moods Influence Thinking
Would you ask your boss for a raise when she was in a grouchy and grumpy mood? Most people would not, reasoning that she would be less likely to offer a reasonable raise when in a bad mood.
People do seem to know which moods are helpful and which moods are not in a particular situation. It’s just that they don’t always know that they know it. Even people stereotyped as anti-feeling depend heavily on emotionality. Take the case of the local high school football team. The coach knows when it is important to psych the team up and to get them thinking that they can win just this one game. Likewise, the coach knows that there are times when he needs to bring the pregame jubilation down a notch or two so his team will be able to better focus on executing the game plan.
How Emotions Influence Decision Making
Physicians are often viewed as pillars of rationality. Their years of medical training are scientifically and intellectually rigorous—so, of course, they would seem to be the last group to be influenced by fleeting moods. But that is not quite the case, as Alice Isen, a psychologist at Cornell University, discovered. In her experiments, already mentioned in Rule of Reason or Rule of Emotion, she gave a small gift to medical students and doctors, with the result that their diagnoses were often more accurate and made more quickly. The finding that is most intriguing to us is that the “happy” doctors provided diagnostic notes that made helpful suggestions for treatment and included offers for further consultation.
How can a cognitive decision-making process be influenced for such a seemingly inconsequential reason? Isen reasons that a gift, even a small one, induces a happy and positive mood. In a positive mood, people are then more likely to feel generous and helpful. But positive moods can also enhance creative problem solving, which may be the reason for the more accurate medical diagnoses.
How Emotion Controls Attention
Research by psychologists such as Gerald Clore (among others, such as our collaborator John D. Mayer) demonstrates that how we feel influences what we pay attention to and how we think, remember, and make decisions.
Clore, for example, induced a happy or a sad mood in research subjects. He then asked them to perform a cognitive, or thinking, task such as judging what they thought of a political candidate or describing their attitudes toward a consumer product. Clore found that changes in mood had a direct impact on people’s judgments.
Mood and Memory Are Linked
Even our memories are linked to our emotions. The closer the match between the mood we experienced during learning and the mood we’re in when we try to remember what we learned the more we remember. This phenomenon—remembering information better when in the same mood as when the information was acquired— is known as mood-congruent memory, or affect-dependent recall.
It’s a straightforward relationship: if you are in a positive mood when you learn new information, it will help to be in a positive mood when you need to recall that information. Likewise, if you were a bit down when you had a conversation with a client and later need to remember what the client said, you might remember more information when you are in the same sort of mood.
That’s an important lesson for the emotionally intelligent manager. For example, have you ever given a problem employee negative feedback, only to find that the person remembered only the positive things you said? If so, you are not alone. This happens for many reasons, but consider for now the mood and memory link. You gave your problem employee (let’s call him Henry) the feedback in a very somber, serious, and grave manner. Later that week, it’s reported to you that Henry felt that the meeting “went fairly well.” In fact, Henry told a colleague of yours that “there are one or two things I need to work on, but the boss thought that I was doing a good job overall.”
Contrary to what you may think, Henry has not lost touch with reality; neither have you. The negative feedback was given under a negative mood condition. The positive feedback, which does have some basis in reality, is recalled when Henry is feeling his usual happy self. He’s primed his memory pump to recall only the positive feedback, as scanty as it was during your conversation with him.
This effect is heightened for memories with a great deal of emotionality. In general, such emotion-laden memories are recalled better, and over longer periods of time, than are memories that are less intense. Perhaps that’s why it is worth spending more time on your presentation to the board so that the message appeals to head and heart. The examples, illustrations, and stories that you tell in a meeting or a formal presentation create an emotional tone whether you realize it or not. It is up to the emotionally intelligent manager to match the mood with the message for maximum impact.
The emotionally intelligent manager is aware of the various connections between emotions and cognitive processes—attention, memory, thinking, reasoning, problem solving—and then attempts to match emotions, whenever possible, to the task at hand or to select tasks based on how a person is feeling.
Feeling for others, establishing rapport, building trust—these are the tasks with which every team leader is confronted. These are also tasks that call for an intelligent integration of emotions with thinking. Generating a vision and communicating it to others so that they remember it, believe it, and buy in to it will likely have a lot to do with more than just the words. It’s the feeling behind the words that will have the biggest impact on your message.
Emotions are not as chaotic as some people may believe. The Predict the Emotional Future: Understanding Emotions examines rules of emotions.