Okay, a while back I read an article about the effects of good news and bad news to a recipient. It goes like this: If you have both a bad news and a good news to relay to someone, like a friend, a family member, an acquaintance, etc–that it is better to tell the good news first before the bad one so that the impact of hearing the bad news–i.e., shock, depression, sadness, torment, disappointment, anger, discouragement, shame, etc—could be diminished or neutralized to a certain degree. Now, this may sound full of kaka, but I wish I still had the original article so I could just quote it verbatim here.
I believe in this finding by the way because once it so happened that a friend of mine from school arrived to deliver two pieces of information to me—one good news and the other was really disappointing. I opted for the good news first. I believe it worked for me. Had I heard the disappointing news first, I would have just sunk into depression at that moment and not care about anything else, including finding out about the other news.
Sound stupid? Just try it out if you happened to be in this situation.