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46Research HighlightsWhen people are happy, they can find things fasterEveryday changes of mood were found to affect the performance of visual searchCREATEA wide range of social psychol-ogy studies support the premise that people are more creative when they are happy, and are more sociable when they are able to engage with many things and people. However, the effect of mood on peo-ple’s ability to perform basic tasks such as noticing or finding things has not been clarified.A team led by Noriko Yamagishi, a senior researcher at the CiNet Brain Networks and Communication Labora-tory, has developed a smartphone app to record variations in people’s level of happiness during their everyday lives, and by having them perform visual search tasks at the same time, it was revealed that a person’s level of happi-ness affects their speed in visual search task (Fig.1). Thirty-three research participants worked on tasks for about 5 minutes each time three times a day (morning, noon, and night) for two weeks (Fig.2). The results showed that a person’s de-“A person’s degree of happiness is not a constant attribute like personality.”gree of happiness is not a constant at-tribute like personality, but changes from one moment to the next. When a person’s happiness level is higher, he/she can locate more quickly a target object set among obstacles.According to Dr. Yamagishi, “The re-sults of this study suggest that it is possible to estimate how happy some-one is by using a smartphone app to monitor their performance in visual search tasks. This could lead to the de-velopment of methods for visualizing the early stages of mental disorders such as depression.”ReferencePLOS ONEURL: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0195865DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0195865The eect of mood state on visual search times for detecting a target in noise: An application of smartphone technologyMaekawa, T., Anderson, S. J., de Brecht, M., Yamagishi, N.Collaboration Research MembersNICT : Toru Maekawa Matthew de Brecht Noriko YamagishiAston University(http://www.aston.ac.uk/) : Ste-phen J. AndersonFig.1 : Eect of happiness level on visual search times