people are more likely to maintain broader attention and solve problems when they’re in a positive mood. “The basic idea is that a positive mood loosens the grip of attention, so that stimuli and ideas that used to get filtered out can now have a greater impact on mental processing. Stress and anxiety have the opposite effect, narrowing attention, which can be good for focused analytic thinking—as long as you keep focus on the right information—but bad for broader creative thinking.”

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