Sad children who heard Mahler's doleful Adagietto tested smarter than cheerful Eine Kleine Nachtmusik listeners.
Children coaxed into a jovial mood performed worse on a simple test of geometric shape recognition than kids put in a dourer mood.
Other research shows that adults in good spirits do worse than sad adults on similar tests.
While listening to the tunes the children played a game where they hunted for a specific geometric shape - a triangle joined to a rectangle, for instance - within a picture. The merry Mozart kids took noticeably longer finding the shapes than the children who were forced to listen to Mahler.
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