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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Positive Affect Improves Working Memory: Implications For Controlled Cognitive Processing, Hwajin Yang, Sujin Yang, Alice M. Isen
Positive Affect Improves Working Memory: Implications For Controlled Cognitive Processing, Hwajin Yang, Sujin Yang, Alice M. Isen
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This study examined the effects of positive affect on working memory (WM) and short-term memory (STM). Given that WM involves both storage and controlled processing and that STM primarily involves storage processing, we hypothesised that if positive affect facilitates controlled processing, it should improve WM more than STM. The results demonstrated that positive affect, compared with neutral affect, significantly enhanced WM, as measured by the operation span task. The influence of positive affect on STM, however, was weaker. These results suggest that positive affect enhances WM, a task that involves controlled processing, not just storage processing. Additional analyses of recall …
Rising Income And The Subjective Well-Being Of Nations, Ed Diener, Louis Tay, Shigehiro Oishi
Rising Income And The Subjective Well-Being Of Nations, Ed Diener, Louis Tay, Shigehiro Oishi
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
We explored whether rising income in nations is associated with increasing subjective well-being (SWB), with several advances over earlier work. Our methods are improved in that across time, the same well-being questions were asked in the same order, and we employed broad and equivalent representative samples over time from a large number of nations. We also assessed psychosocial factors that might mediate the relation of income and SWB. We found that changes in household income were associated with concomitant changes in life evaluations, positive feelings, and negative feelings. The effects of gross domestic product (GDP) change were weaker and significant …