Happiness helps, but how? : does interhemispheric communication mediate the impact of positive affect on cognitive flexibility?

Abstract

Numerous studies have demonstrated that positive affect has beneficial effects on cognition, mainly due to more efficient and flexible processing of information. Yet, the neural mechanism of these effects has not been thoroughly investigated. We compared the performance of subjects on tasks of cognitive flexibility and interhemispheric communication based on a manipulation of either positive or neutral affect. However, the predicted main effect of affect condition was not observed. Multiple regression analysis indicated that, instead of interhemispheric communication mediating the influence of positive affect, positive affect and interhemispheric communication made independent contributions to increasing cognitive flexibility. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of existing research.