How Mood Changes What We Notice
Dr Mark Bellamy PhD, CPsychol, AFBPsS
Chartered Psychologist | Founder, LegalPsych
One of the more interesting features of mood is that it does not simply change how we feel. It can also influence what we notice, what we remember and how we interpret what is happening around us. This matters in legal work because lawyers spend a considerable part of their professional lives interpreting information, assessing significance and making judgements under conditions that are not always entirely clear.
When we feel reasonably good, the world can appear correspondingly more manageable. We may notice encouraging information more readily, interpret an ambiguous email less negatively or regard a difficult conversation as something that can probably be resolved. When mood is lower, the same environment can look rather different. Criticism becomes more salient, uncertainty feels more threatening and ambiguous information may be interpreted less favourably.
Psychologists have studied related processes through ideas such as mood-congruent memory and mood-dependent information processing. The evidence is more nuanced than simply saying that good moods produce positive thoughts and bad moods produce negative ones, but there is reasonable support for the broader proposition that our emotional state can influence attention, memory and judgement. Our experience of the world is not completely independent of the psychological state from which we are observing it.
I think this becomes particularly relevant during sustained periods of professional load. Imagine a lawyer who has slept poorly, worked intensely for several weeks and is carrying several difficult matters simultaneously. Their interpretation of an abrupt email from a client or colleague may not be identical to the interpretation they would make when rested, psychologically settled and operating with greater available capacity. The email has not changed, but the person receiving it has.
There is an important performance point here because our interpretations influence what we do next. If we perceive greater threat, we may become more defensive, respond too quickly or devote disproportionate attention to something relatively minor. Equally, an unusually positive emotional state can sometimes encourage overconfidence or reduce our sensitivity to genuine risk. Feeling good is not automatically synonymous with judging well.
The useful skill is therefore not trying to maintain a permanently positive mood. That would be unrealistic, and I am not convinced it would necessarily improve professional judgement. What matters more is metacognitive awareness: recognising that the state from which we are interpreting something may be influencing the interpretation itself.
Before responding to an email that has irritated us, making a significant decision after an exhausting week or concluding that a difficult meeting was a disaster, it may be useful to ask whether we would see the situation in exactly the same way from a different psychological state. Sometimes the answer will still be yes, and the concern deserves attention. At other times, a night's sleep, a conversation with somebody we trust or simply allowing our emotional state to settle may produce a somewhat different reading.
For lawyers, whose work depends so heavily upon judgement, this seems worth understanding. We cannot remove emotion from professional decision-making, nor should we assume that emotion necessarily undermines it. We can, however, become better at noticing the state in which our judgements are being made and allowing for the possibility that what we are hearing from the world is partly influenced by the state from which we are listening.