Negative emotions reduce how much we trust others

Negative emotions and bad mood are enough to make a person more distrustful, suggests a study. Negative emotions reduce how much we trust others, even if these emotions were triggered by events that have nothing to do with the decision to trust. This revealed that a region that is widely implicated in understanding others’ beliefs, the temporoparietal junction, was significantly suppressed during trust decisions when participants felt threatened, but not when they felt safe. “These results show that negative emotions can significantly impact our social interactions, and specifically how much we trust others. Negative effect suppresses the social cognitive neural machinery important for understanding and predicting others’ behaviour,” explained authors Jan Engelmann and Christian Ruff.