“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads; and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue.” The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson understood how moods can change perception—a process called the mood congruent attentional bias. It turns out that when your mood gets worse, so does your brain’s negative bias. Feeling down means you’re more likely to notice negative things about the world and about yourself. This includes context-dependent memory, mentioned in chapter 1, which, in certain contexts, makes you less likely to remember happy events
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