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There is no doubt that negative emotions affect our behaviour. Not feeling well makes you mistreat other people and make bad decisions. However, did you know that negative emotions also affect how much you trust other people? Scientists from the University of Amsterdam and the University of Zurich conducted experiments, which revealed that incidental aversive affect can influence trust behaviour.
Feeling threatened increases the social anxiety and people strop trusting one another even if trust has nothing to do with the threats. Image credit: Wikimedia
Researchers used threat-of-shock method in their experiments. Participants were threatened with electrical shock, but it was actually administered quite rarely. This, of course, induces anxiety, related to anticipation of pain. In this context participants had to play a game, designed to check their trust. Even though their decision to trust one another had nothing to do with electric shocks, researchers found that participants indeed trusted significantly less when they were anxious about receiving a shock. In other words, participants chose not to trust each other much more when they were anticipating the potential of shock, even though trust had nothing to do with the actual shock.
At the same time scientists used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to record and analyse brain activity of the participants when they were making their trust decisions. Scientists found that when participants were threatened their temporoparietal junction, responsible for understanding others’ beliefs, was significantly suppressed during trust decisions. Anxiety disrupted normal brain activity and communication between different regions. This made them question motifs of other people, even if they were not the ones administering the shock or threatening to do so.
Scientists say that this research proves that negative emotions have a strong negative impact on the way we interact with each other. We stop trusting each other when we’re anxious or are not feeling safe. Jan Engelmann and Christian Ruff also said that results of the research “also reveal the underlying effects of negative affect on brain circuitry: negative affect suppresses the social cognitive neural machinery important for understanding and predicting others’ behaviour”. You should remember that next time you are provided with a choice to trust another person.
Negative emotions have many negative effects. That’s just the way it is. But in this way they can change outcomes of certain situations. If you had a bad morning you may not do well in job interview because you will be feeling anxious and not ready to trust the interviewer. You should be aware of it – being aware of your emotions and knowing how they impact your behaviour is a very useful skill to have.
Source: University of Amsterdam