Mood

Hospital can be an intimidating and stressful place, one in which doctors can sometimes feel blue - and not just for the patients.

After returning from my Singapore trip, I started my first working day with an overnight call. The long work hours, as usual, were interrupted by the beeper calls from everywhere. Anyone who works in the hospital quickly learns that it's a race to see whether your beeper battery goes dead before you do so.

Did the work drive me nuts? Not really. I keep telling myself to be in good mood rather than working like Eeyore. A number of behavioural studies, in fact, have already shown that emotions can influence our mental activities. A good example of this proved that the mood affects the way we see things by modulating the activity of the visual cortex. When the study subjects in that Canadian study were shown photographs of faces expressing positive emotion (and with a higher self-reported mood after that), they have better better peripheral vision (confirmed by functional magnetic resonance imaging that monitored the visual cortical activity).

In case you're wondering whether doctors are immune to the unconscious influence from the mood, here's the answer: No, they're worse. In another experiment, a group of doctors were given a small bag of wrapped candy containing Hershey's chocolate and another group received nothing. They were then told to look at a patient's history and make a diagnosis. The doctors who got the candy were quicker to detect the liver problem than those who didn't.