That paradox appeals to Dr. Blank's problem-solving mind.
Mr. Close described him as "the single greatest problem-solving mind I've ever worked with".
There are four groups of items that are scored as sub-scales, which estimate the tendency to use different mental strategies for dealing with low mood: rumination, distraction, problem-solving and dangerous (acts).
The presence of a marked liberal criterion with neutral pictures at two different delays and for both low (Experiment 1) and high levels of recollection (Experiment 2) appears consistent with differences linked to dysphoric mood in the problem-solving literature (Slife & Weaver, 1992).
Additionally, mood affected performance if it was induced before the learning phase; participants in a negative mood needed more repetitions to reach the mastery level and also performed worse in the transfer tasks, although there were no greater mood differences in this problem-solving phase.
Evidence suggest rumination constitutes a response to negative mood (Rippere 1977), and can be perceived by ruminators as a potential way to solve their problems (Wells and Matthews 1994), although it most often exacerbates negative mood, impairs concentration, and problem-solving tasks (Lyubomirsky and Tkach 2004).
In female undergraduates, academic, economic and interpersonal stressors have been found to induce negative mood through the mediating role of maladaptive problem-solving strategies [ 16].
In a study amongst formerly suicidal patients, Williams et al. [ 7] showed that problem-solving abilities and autobiographical memory specificity, commonly associated with suicidal thinking and behavior, deteriorate when the patient's mood lowers again.
Positive moods at a medium level of activation were found to facilitate adequate, planned, and reflective problem-solving behaviours in a study by Reither and Stäudel (1985), whereas negative emotions increased the tendency to avoid a problem by shifting attention to easier tasks (Schwarz and Bless 1991).
A problem-solving chamber?
