Chapter 1: THE IMPACT OF POSITIVE MOOD ON LEARNING

 

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

 

A.   Background of the Study

 

Numerous studies show that individuals who are in a positive mood are successful across multiple life domains like marriage, friendship, income, work performance, and health. Because most people in that mood are more focus on the positive things and the positive outcome of being happy on what they are doing, but it doesn’t mean ignoring the bad sides of their life, but it shows the balance on how we will take things seriously or not. All that information shows only the concept of positive mood in our lives but in arguing with that, the happiness and success exists not only because success makes people happy, but also because positive mood affect engenders success. Relevant studies are described and revealed that “happiness is associated and precedes numerous successful outcomes, as well as behaviors paralleling success.” Furthermore, the evidence suggests that “positive mood affect our well-being that may be the cause of many of the desirable characteristics, resources, and successes correlated with happiness.”(http://www.researchgate.net/publication
/7419311_The_benefits_of_frequent_positive_affect_does_happiness_lead_to
_success).

 

Positive mood allows human brain to think more creatively. This study shows that people who do things like reading books, listening to music and other things that they do in their vacant time are not necessarily wasting their time but putting themselves in a right mood so they can think and do things right and more creatively. For this study, Nadler one of the researcher in Association for Psychological Science done an experiment to different kinds of students who is in a positive mood and in the negative mood, They are given an specific task to do, to test who is better at learning capabilities. After that they said that "If you have a project where you want to think innovatively, or you have a problem to carefully consider, being in a positive mood can help you to do that" (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101215113253.htm).

 

            Positive mood facilitates cognitive functions in our actions. According to the article of Ika Febrilia, it includes “the flexibility, integration, and utilization of cognitive material such as memory, categorization, creative problem solving, decision-making and learning.” This study proposes a further explanation between positive and negative mood to students’ learning and the impact of that learning on student’s academic performance. Their study also found out that positive moods motivate a student to organize the academic material in memory for better recall. It supports the student in a positive mood will provide excitement to him/her to study and as the result; they are able to perform a better academic performance.(http://sv.libarts.psu.ac.th/conference5

/proceedings/Proceedings3/article/2pdf/007.pdf)

            Other studies used cartoons, movies, reading stories, or manipulated winning and losing scores on a game to induce moods. The performance of children in self-generated positive moods was contrasted with the students in a neutral mood. According to the article of Tanis Bryan and James Bryan entitled “Positive mood and math performance” from the website of Journal of Learning Disabilities, he employed students identified by teachers as being at risk for referral because of reading or math problems. The task involved learning five survival vocabulary words. Children in the positive mood condition learned more words than children in the neutral condition. Two studies also of Tanis Bryan and James Bryan examined the impact of mood induction on the performance of addition and subtraction problems. In the first study, subjects were children at risk for referral; in the other study, subjects were third through eleventh-grade students with severe learning disabilities attending a private school for students with learning disabilities. The results of both studies showed that students in the positive mood computed more problems accurately than students in the neutral mood condition.

 

            In addition to the positive mood, according to the Mental Health News by Dr. Trupti Shirole, they says that positive mood has also negative effects on memory storage capacity of the brain, because they conducted a study that when you are in positive mood because of the happy environment, you tend to forget something, like in the party you asked the phone numbers of people but you forgot it, because you’re enjoying yourself in the party unlike if you are in a neutral mood your more focus and better at remembering things.

            So, instead of thinking other benefits of having a positive mood in our daily lives, this paper focuses on the main reasons and impact of positive mood on learning performance.



 

 

B.   Statement of the Problem

          This study aims to answer this question:
 

1. What is the impact of having a positive mood on learning?

 

C.   Significance of the Study

Students. This research paper would be helpful to all the students just like me, to know if our mood affects our way of learning or our learning performance, because it is important to us, as a student to know the best way for us to improve our learning capabilities and to determine the other factors, such as student’s self-motivation to study when his\her mood is in positive or negative.

Teachers and Professors. Teachers and professors would also benefit from this study, because they would be able to know the effective strategy on how to manage their mood in order for them to keep the general mood to the class, to have a positive and focused learning environment to the class and to have a great day of learning for the students.

 

Parents. This would also help our parents to know that not only our personal characteristic, environment, peer relations, social class and other things that can affects our learning but also our moods, because it boost up our credibility and sincerity of learning, that is why it is important to our parents to know if we are in a positive or negative mood to help us and motivate us in studying.
 

Future Researchers. Many researchers have been studied this topic in the past, that is why it has many results, but I think until now many researchers are not done examining and proving that positive mood can affect our learning, that is why this research paper is significant to the future researchers, because it summarize and explain the other things that can affect our learning performance. And if in the future, they will conduct a study about this, this paper would be a source of some valuable information about the moods and learning process and there might be an improvement in the learning process of every individual that has that certain mood.

D.   Scope and Delimitation

This study focuses on the impact of having a positive mood on learning. Positive mood has been considered as the big impact to our learning capabilities, learning process and our learning performance, also if you’re in a negative mood, because mood is a type of affective state which is temporarily we feel in a particular to a specific time and situation.

 

            Due to the wide benefit of positive mood and learning problems, this study will only discuss the effects of having positive mood on learning and give emphasis on how positive moods help us in our learning skills and does our mood really help and contribute to our ability to learn. Therefore, this study would be relevant for those people whose searching for the impact of our moods on our learning ability. Aside of it is a wide topic, I will not discuss more about the other not important things about positive mood but to only give the researchers the answers to the main impact of positive mood on learning.

 

E.    Materials and Methods

 

In this research, it employs a descriptive and informative method, because most of the researchers described the result and the information that they gathered to the experiment or test that they conducted to know if the mood affect on learning. And in this method we will know if it is true and if it is helpful to us, so I use to describe and cite some example to support my gathered information about learning and positive mood. I think this method that I used is a very helpful to have the best answer to the problem.

 

The materials and references that I used in this research paper to gathered a right and factual information are journal articles from the internet, old research papers that is related to my topic and psychology articles that proven my topic.

 

F.    Definition of Terms

Mood. It is is defined as “a type of affective state which is transient and particular to a specific time and situation” (Jeon, 1990, p.24).

 

Positive Mood. Is one’s mental state and feelings where she/he feels more confident, optimistic, and unconstrained (Forest, Clark, Mills, & Isen, 1979).

 

Negative Mood. When one feels, depression, anxiety and fatigue, it can be said that negative mood takes place his/her feeling state (Watson and Tellegen, 1985).

 

Learning process. Happens when one is acquiring new knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information (Magno, 2003). He also explained learning as a process that takes place through assimilation, accommodation, and equilibration.

 

Academic performance. It is measured from the increasing of examination and assignment results’ efficiency, effectiveness, and quality, as an evaluation or assessment method on student’s performance. This performance can be achieved, if it is supported by qualified education system and effective learning process. (Lebcir, Wells, and Bond, 2008; Lasso, 2008).