You’ve had a disastrous interaction with the person closest to you in the world. It’s likely you’ll get past this, but until you do, you can hardly think about anything else. Unfortunately, you can’t put your brain on hold until this all resolves itself.
Researchers in the area of emotions and cognition have long maintained that there are strong links between feeling and thinking. One approach in particular, the “broaden and build” theory, maintains that when you’re upset about something, you view the world in terms of tiny details, but when you’re happy, everything is covered in a big, rosy glow. It’s impossible, the theory says, to draw a bright line between thoughts and emotions due to this process.
But Wait—There’s More
According to Leiden University’s Martin Kolnes and Andero Uusberg (2025), as compelling as it may seem, broaden and build theory is hard to test in the lab. In real life, you have many experiences that aren’t always 100 percent negative or positive. You also have to find ways to focus even when it’s the last thing in the world you feel like doing.
Experimental tests of broaden and build may have lacked some of the reality of putting people in actual situations when they have to set their emotions aside. The solution the authors arrived at to make the magic happen used a somewhat obscure but clever approach developed in prior research on emotions and perception.
The Clever Little Test of Emotional Clarity
This fascinating little measure is known as the Navon test, and it is a practical way to test how far and wide your attention goes when you’re in an emotional state. It simply involves showing someone a large capital letter (such as an “E”), which is made up of teeny-tiny other letters (such as H’s). As you can see here, if you broaden out, you’ll see the “E,” but if you peer carefully at the stimulus, you’ll readily see the H’s:
To create the desired emotional states, Kolnes and Uusberg asked their participants to recall and write about an event from the past few months that elicited positive or negative emotions. Then they completed a set of Navon tasks. The authors also took into account the participant’s current mood to rule that out of the equation.
Broaden and build theory didn’t completely work in the results, but the authors did discover that negative emotional prompts seemed to have the effect of using up cognitive resources; as the authors explained: “Emotional stimuli are known not only to attract cognitive resources but also to ‘lock them up’ to an extent that hinders performance on a subsequent task.”
In real-life situations that present more complex scenarios than the Navon task, this seeping out of mental energy could take on more consequential proportions. What if you’re driving or riding a bicycle while you’re preoccupied with a situation such as that mess in your relationship? There remains a danger that you’re not fully present in the moment and able to respond when you need to make a sudden decision.
Is It Always Bad to Experience Negative Emotions?
Getting past a negative emotion can be an important way to gain mental clarity, but maybe it’s all about time and place. When you don’t need your mind to accomplish important tasks, it can be of value to acknowledge your feelings. Rather than pretending the bad thing didn’t happen, allowing yourself to process it, or even move on to try to repair the relationship, could help free your mind from your preoccupation.
To sum up, knowing that processing an emotional situation could drain your thinking capacity can be of value in allowing yourself to use your mental capacity to its fullest.
