Self-Focused and Sad

You can’t enter a peak performance mental edge when you are in a bad mood. You may not necessarily need to feel happy, but you certainly can’t feel overly sad, frustrated, angry or depressed and expect to cultivate a winning, mental edge. A recent study in Psychological Science shows how feeling sad while focusing on your inner experience can hinder you ability to find your mental edge.

Professor Jennifer Lerner at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government studies how emotions impact judgments. She and her colleagues (Cryder, Lerner, Gross, & Dahl, 2008) showed how a combination of focusing on oneself and feeling sad can produce biased perceptions of the value of a commodity. In their experiment, university students viewed either a relatively drab documentary or the emotionally charged scene from The Champ where a young boy pleads with his father not to die after sustaining injuries from a boxing match. Several studies have shown that not only do people feel sad when watching this scene, they actually start crying. A separate aspect of the study was a manipulation of self-focus. Participants’ focus was shifted inward so that they were overly absorbed with their personal experience. At the start of the experiment, all participants were given $10 for showing up. At the end of the experiment, participants were offered an insulated sports water bottle to purchase. Participants were asked to make a bid on the water bottle. Participants who were not focused on themselves and not sad said they would pay about 50 cents for the water bottle, but the participants who were sad and overly focused on their emotions and personal experience valued the water bottle at $2.50, which is about five times more than what people who were not sad and self-focused bid. These results highlight the impact of focusing on the experience of feeling sad rather than maintaining an objective state of mind. When one is sad and self-focused, one’s judgment is distorted.

When you feel sad, you are likely to remember past setbacks, and you are also likely to have a negative view of yourself and a pessimistic outlook. It’s much more useful to take any setback in stride. When life goes against you, don’t mull over it too much. Life is naturally going to beat you down, and you should expect it. Rather than wallow in self-pity, immediately search for a quick, effective solution. Setbacks are inevitable. Rather than stew, take decisive action and move forward. Don’t blame yourself. Accept responsibility and consider the message of the serenity prayer: Accept what you can change and change it, and don’t get bogged down by things you can’t change.