Fancy a splash of cream? CREDIT: Markus Reugels, LiquidArt |
Caffeine may make the world seem like a better place, helping people
spot positive words, researchers have found. Past research has found that
people are faster and more accurate at recognizing positive words such as
"happy" than negative words such as "mad," and similar
effects are seen with pictures and sounds. This emotional bias is curious,
given how people are equally good at remembering both positive and negative
details of an event, such as words, pictures and sounds. "What causes this
difference?" said researcher Lars Kuchinke, an experimental psychologist
at Ruhr University in Germany.
To see what triggers this positivity advantage, the researchers decided
to experiment with caffeine. Caffeine helps lead to faster responses and fewer errors in simple mental
tasks, and one might expect it would help people recognize both positive and
negative words. Scientists asked 66
volunteers to decide as fast and accurately as possible whether strings of
letters they saw on computer screens were real words or not. Half the
volunteers were given a lactose pill that had no effect on results, while the
other half were given tablets containing 200 milligrams of caffeine 30 minutes
before testing, equivalent to about two or three cups of coffee.
The investigators found volunteers who consumed caffeine tablets were
more accurate by up to 7 percent at recognizing positive words than other
words, with no effect seen when it came to emotionally neutral or negative
words. This reveals that although caffeine improves some mental functions,
"the present study shows that this may be specific for certain types of
stimuli, like only positive words," Kuchinke told LiveScience.
Prior studies have shown caffeine probably stimulates the central
nervous system by increasing activity of the brain chemical dopamine, which is linked with rewards, creativity, impulsivity and addiction. Since
caffeine seemed to boost the positivity advantage, these findings suggest the
root of the positivity advantage may rest in dopamine. Future research might
see if brain scans can verify this link with dopamine, and might also test if
caffeine helps people better recognize positive faces or pictures. Kuchinke and colleague Vanessa Lux detailed their findings online Nov. 7
in the journal PLoS ONE.
Source: Live Science
Please share
No comments:
Post a Comment