Emotional Multitasking
This morning, I was chatting on IM, checking email, and reading an article for class (a typical Friday morning). As I was doing this, I found myself wondering about how people multitask at an emotional level. Since working memory is limited to just a couple items (7 +- 2) at a time, people who are good at multitasking are those who are good at quickly swapping task-related data in and out of memory. What sort of effect does this have on emotion? For example, if you were IMing with someone about happy news, but reading a very sad email, would your emotions fluctuate as you flipped between the two items? Would the stronger emotion dominate, or would the other emotion help to temper it?
