Positive feelings have a contagious effect, enhancing the wellbeing of yourself and those around you. Negative feelings have a similar contagious effect and can spread worry and stress if they persist.
Optimizing positive feelings and mastering stress is associated with the ability to respond rapidly to positive information, and ignore the negative. When feeling stressed and down, responses to this positive information are slowed, and the negative information stands out. This has been referred to as a "mood congruent bias" (1,2). It has been linked to systems involving the frontal brain regions (3).
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