Justification for Melancholy

[tealin]

Even when I was a child, I gravitated strongly towards minor key music and tragic stories. I suspect my darkness worried a number of people. Little did they know I was improving my attention to detail and analysis skills!

Study Proves Sad Children Out-Perform Happy Children

I am now abuzz with theories for possible ramifications ... does the much larger proportion of minor (or modal) French children's songs have anything to do with how they seem to be intrinsically better at drawing? Do you stunt your child's intellectual development by feeding them only jaunty, happy media, as most children's media is? Does this effect continue into adulthood? Was listening to Thomas Newman soundtracks responsible for the overly technical animation I did on that seagull? Is this why Christian Pop and its devotees annoy me so much? Oh, the possibilities!

EDIT: The transcript of the segment of As It Happens where I heard about this study is behind the cut. They have more/different information than the story linked to above.

Someone once said, "A happy person is like a steaming bowl of oatmeal on a winter morning -- except that the oatmeal is smarter." That person was me. And I was not in a good mood when I said it, because some smiling doofus had just taken the last box of instant oatmeal and then strolled away, whistling.

And now scientists in England -- grumpy ones, presumably -- have provided some actual proof that joy and intelligence may not always be a happy couple.

Psychologist Simone Schnall and her colleagues at the University of Plymouth conducted a two-part test on ten-and eleven-year-olds. In the first test, they played this piece of music to one group:[a few bars of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik]Yay! And then they played the second group this piece of music:[A few bars of Mahler's 'Adagitto'] Boo. And then, the researchers asked each group -- the happy-music gang and the sad-music clump -- to search for a specific geometric shape within a picture. And they found that the kids who had had their hearts lifted by "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" had apparently had their brains lowered. They took significantly longer to find the shapes than did the children who had been mauled by Mahler's "Adagietto".

In the second part of the test, the psychologists split the kids into three groups. To one group, they showed a scene from The Jungle Book, wherein Baloo the bear cavorted while singing "Bare Necessities". To the second group, they showed a scene from a movie called The Last Unicorn, wherein nothing of any emotional import happened. And to the third, they showed a scene that could turn the happy-go-luckiest kid sad-go-unlucky: Simba the lion mourning the death of his father Mufasa, from The Lion King.

This test had similar results. The kids who watched the delightful bear were slow at picking out shapes. The kids who watched the neutral scene were somewhat quicker. And the kids whose innocence had been forever stolen from them were fastest of all.

The researchers have drawn this conclusion: that happiness may make people less discerning, while sadness, and I quote, "indicates something is amiss, triggering detail-oriented analytical processing." Which we all know to be true. For example, after a break-up, the sorrow may reveal details about how your ex-boyfriend was a jerk. And the subsequent analytical processing may lead to further discovery, such as the realization that your ex-boyfriend was a stupid jerk.

I may be oversimplifying, but I'm feeling pretty upbeat, so it's possible I just don't understand.

But here's something to raise the spirits of those whose spirits are already naturally high. Apparently, kids who are happy are better at exercises that require creativity. Which explains why all artists are so exuberant all the time.

Like this one: here's Otis Redding, with "The Happy Song (Dum-Dum-De-De-De-Dum-Dum). But maybe you should ask the kids to leave the room. As those University of Plymouth researchers warn: "Artificially inflating a child's mood may have unintended, and possibly undesirable, cognitive consequences."

You can listen to the whole show here.

Comments

[azvolrien.livejournal.com]

Well, now I'm mildly insulted.