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Conductor is playing the same sad song over and over again.

      Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, a psychologist at Yale University, has been investigating rumination for more than a decade, and her research indicates that people who ruminate are more likely to develop depression; moreover, they experience more severe symptoms of depression. We wondered what effect rumination might have on working memory and discovered that emerging evidence suggests a relationship. Robert Hester and Hugh Garavan of Dublin’s Trinity College artificially increased rumination on negative thoughts by showing adults lists of words with negative connotations like murder, anger, and fight. They found that rumination not only made people more depressed but also impaired their working memory.

      In a related 2008 study, psychologists Jutta Joorman and Ian Gotlib gave two groups of people a task that required them to update information continually in their working memory, as well as trying to inhibit words with negative connotations. One group of participants was suffering from depression and the other was not. They found that the depressed individuals had more difficulty in not mulling over negative words, which inhibited their working memory.

      We wanted to investigate these links ourselves, so we spent three months researching a group of more than one hundred twenty-somethings. We chose people in their twenties because these are the years in which people tend to move out of their parents’ home, make new friends, and explore new ideas, and though this transition into adulthood can be exciting, it can also be a stressful time and result in a sense of feeling overwhelmed and even depressed. Because this age group faces so many challenges to their happiness, they presented a good opportunity for us to explore how working memory helps us to manage our emotions and stay positive.

      The twenty-somethings in our study performed several cognitive tasks. First, they completed a working memory task from Tracy’s Alloway Working Memory Assessment (AWMA). We asked them questions such as, “Oranges live in water. True or false?” and then asked them to repeat the last word of the statement. Questions like this engage working memory because the brain is forced to hold the sentence in mind and decide if it’s a true statement while repeating the last word. We then divided the participants into those with strong and weak working memory.

      We also asked these young adults to complete questionnaires often used in hospitals and clinics to provide an objective measure of depression. This required participants to rate statements depending on how strongly they felt each applied to them during the past week. Some statements expressed negative feelings such as, “I was bothered by things that don’t usually bother me.” Others expressed positive feelings such as, “I felt hopeful about the future.” Based on their responses, we determined whether they were depressed. We also measured their tendency for rumination using a similar questionnaire.

      We had hypothesized that ruminators and depressed participants would have relatively poor working memory and that ruminators would be depressed. But when we analyzed the working memory scores, depression status, and propensity for rumination among the young adults, we made some very surprising findings: not all of the ruminators had low working memory scores, and not all ruminators were depressed. The ruminators who had good working memory were less likely to suffer depression compared to the ruminators who had poor working memory. Our interpretation is that though their working memory Conductor plays the same song, it is also strong enough to inhibit the negative emotions associated with depression.

      Working Memory and the Glass Half Full

      The results of our study on working memory, rumination, and depression were an exciting start because they revealed that people do use working memory to manage emotions, resolve problems, and avoid slipping into depression. Encouraged by these findings, we looked at the opposite end of the happiness scale to determine if a strong working memory makes people more likely to choose optimism.

      To explore this question, we joined forces with the British Science Festival, a hugely popular annual event celebrating science, engineering, and technology. With help in promoting our study and inviting festivalgoers to participate in it, we were able to conduct another large-scale study involving thousands of adults. The scale of the study helped us understand how working memory influences happiness and if a strong working memory will make you more likely to see the glass half full.

      For this study, participants completed a working memory test and filled out the Life Orientation Test, a clinical questionnaire that gauges levels of optimism and pessimism. We also asked participants to answer yes or no to the following questions:

      1 In uncertain times, I usually expect the best.

      2 I’m always optimistic about my future.

      3 If something can go wrong for me, it will. I rarely count on good things happening to me.

      When we looked at their responses, we found a correlation between the strength of working memory and level of optimism. Those with stronger working memory were more likely to have a high level of optimism, while those with weaker working memory tended to be more pessimistic. These results suggest that people with high working memory tend to be more hopeful and confident about the future, while those with weak working memory tend to be more pessimistic.

      The research we have examined so far in this chapter suggests that a good working memory is associated with happiness and optimism. It’s not a direct causal relationship because happiness is complex, and many factors—both personal and cultural—play into personal happiness. So although a strong working memory can’t guarantee optimism, it can set your feet more firmly on the path to fulfillment.

      One of the huge benefits of optimism is a longer and more satisfying life. Becca Levy’s research at the University of Yale’s School of Public Health demonstrated that older adults who are optimistic about aging live an average of 7.5 years longer than their less optimistic counterparts. An optimistic outlook is also associated with a healthier life. For example, Hillary Tindale and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh found that optimism reduces the risk of coronary heart disease, which can lead to death. In their study of almost one hundred thousand women aged fifty to seventy-nine, they compared the 25 percent most optimistic with the 25 percent most pessimistic and found that the optimistic women had less risk of cardiovascular problems, as well as reduced risk for diabetes and hypertension. A study with men followed over a ten-year period found similar results: those who were optimistic were less likely to develop coronary heart disease as they aged compared to those who were pessimistic.

      Less Is More

      At the end of this chapter, we share some simple exercises to help you strengthen your working memory, but in the meantime let’s take a quick look at a few coping strategies to improve both working memory and happiness.

      In Chapter 2, we introduced you to our friend Sam who struggled to wade through all the possibilities after losing his job. Too many choices result in psychological stress and unhappiness. A 2010 study by Hazel Markus and Barry Schwartz published in the Journal of American Consumer Research backed this up, finding that although American culture venerates choice and freedom, people often become paralyzed by unlimited choice and are less happy with their decisions as a result.

      As you saw in Chapter 2, an excess of choice can overload your working memory and lead to lots of negative consequences, including an increase in stress and anxiety, an inability to make a decision, and even ruminating over whether you’ve made the right choice. So one way to improve your happiness is to minimize the number of choices you have to make. At the office, for example, you might want to dedicate specific chunks of time to specific tasks and open only one program on your computer screen rather than toggling between multiple windows and switching back and forth between options.

      At home, many of us feel that rushing our children off to five activities a day will improve their lives and make them happier. The reality is that offering your children too many choices of extracurricular activities may overwhelm them and reduce how well they perform in the activities they do pursue. By choosing a few activities

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