Mood and personal information management: how we feel influences how we organize our information

Two studies explore whether people's digital filing behaviors are affected by emotional factors when engaging in personal information management (PIM). Cognitive science research shows that people's information categorization behaviors are mood-dependent, so that positive moods induce larger, more inclusive organizational categories, whereas negative moods elicit more fine-grained organization. However, such mood-dependent organization has not been directly studied in the context of PIM. Our first, naturalistic study examines relations between people's overall filing habits and a personality trait, neuroticism, which is commonly associated with negative mood. Our results reveal the expected mood-dependency effects; participants who report more prevalent negative mood patterns when surveyed, also create different organizational structures. Overall, they make more folders that contain fewer files and store these in deeper folder structures. The second, experimental study directly manipulated mood and examined how this affects organization of a controlled file collection. Again as predicted, participants experiencing negative moods created significantly more folders containing fewer files, and there was a trending effect of negative mood on folder depth. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for PIM arising from these novel results.