Semantic activity is the activation and retrieval of words in memory. If you see the word ‘dog’ there is a good chance other associated words come to mind: cat, bone, collar. When people are in happy moods, semantic activity is facilitated. Happiness fosters greater access to strong and weakly related works, which can benefit creativity, idea generation, more fluent speaking. However, our research also finds that there is an associated cost, greater false memories. When more words are active in mind, it becomes harder to know if they were experienced or just activated in mind.

Our work has found that perception is not static, but rather our perceptions of the world are often biased. People who experience emotional arousal can see heights as taller. With greater fear, people may be biased to see neutral objects, like a stick, as possibly dangerous. That is, when in a fear state, perception may be biased to initially see it as a snake. Our research is investigating as to why fear or emotional arousal biases perception to better understand the benefits and consequences of such biases.

Inhibition is an important executive function to coordinate and achieve goals. Inhibition is an effortful process that helps to maintain attention, prevent impulse or non-goal relevant behavior, or to prevent distraction. We find that states of sadness and fear can facilitate inhibition. For sadness, it can benefit identifying issues in one’s environment and to maintain attention to hopefully resolve it. Now, there are downsides, sadness can reduce creativity because of inhibition. We are currently investigating why and how sadness and fear foster inhibition.