Mood Congruent Recall

Mood Congruent Recall

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mood congruent recall refers to the observation that people tend to remember more information that is consistent or congruent with their mood at the time that they were exposed to that information. Being in a particular mood can cause people to pay more attention to information that matches their mood and to think more about or elaborate that information (Bower and Forgas 2000). These cognitive processes lead to better memory for the information. For example, a person in a happy mood may pay more attention to the happy scenes of a movie and elaborate the scenes by relating them to happy events in his or her life. As a result, weeks after seeing the movie, the person may remember more of the happy scenes than the sad scenes.

Mood congruent recall differs from mood dependent recall —the observation that the information a person attends to while in one mood is better recalled later if the person is in the same mood (regardless of its emotional quality). For example, Eric Eich, Dawn Macaulay, and Lee Ryan (1994) directed university students to read familiar nouns (e.g., ship, street), then describe an autobiographical event that came to mind for each noun. A happy (or sad) mood was induced in students by having them entertain elating (or depressing) thoughts while listening to lively (or languid) music. Participants described a range of happy, sad, and neutral events in response to the nouns. Later, they recalled the autobiographical events either in the same or opposite mood. Participants recalled more positive, negative, and neutral events when they were in the same mood than in the opposite mood.

Several approaches have been proposed to explain mood congruent recall (see Eich and Forgas [2003] for a review of these approaches). Gordon Bower (1981) suggested that a person’s long-term memory is characterized by an associative network of concepts whereby emotions become associated with thought processes and concepts of things and situations encountered in daily life. When an emotion is aroused, it spreads activation to concepts and thought processes that are associated with the emotion. This knowledge guides a person’s interpretation of the current context in a way that is congruent with the emotion.

According to the affect as information view, people make judgments by implicitly asking themselves, “How do I feel about it?” (Clore et al. 2000). For example, when people were asked about their reaction to a happy or sad film that they had just watched, they showed strong mood congruence, with happy filmgoers recalling the film to be much more positive than the sad filmgoers (Schwarz and Clore 1983).

The affect infusion model attempts to explain the conditions under which mood congruence occurs or fails to occur by examining the different kinds of cognitive processes that are involved (Forgas 1995). For example, people may be motivated not to act in a mood congruent way (as when a person really wants a job at a company and ignores negative feelings toward some of the interviewers). However, mood congruence occurs when people engage in relatively elaborate processing, such as trying to form an impression of someone with an unusual combination of attributes—for example, a surfer who likes Italian opera.

Research on mood congruence highlights the important interplay between emotions and cognition. For many years, scholars tended to neglect emotion or consider it detrimental to judgment and decision-making. However, the interplay between emotions and cognition appears to be ubiquitous, and can even be beneficial.

SEE ALSO Cognition; Decision-making; Emotion; Memory; Mood; Motivation

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bower, Gordon H. 1981. Mood and Memory. American Psychologist 36: 129-148.

Bower, Gordon H., and Joseph P. Forgas. 2000. Mood and Social Memory. In Handbook of Affect and Social Cognition, ed. Joseph P. Forgas, 96-120. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Clore, Gerald L., Karen Gasper, and Erika Garvin. 2000. Affect as Information. In Handbook of Affect and Social Cognition, ed. Joseph P. Forgas, 121-144. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Eich, Eric, and Joseph P. Forgas. 2003. Mood, Cognition, and Memory. In Handbook of Psychology, Vol. 4: Experimental Psychology, eds. Alice F. Healy and Robert W. Proctor, 61-83. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Eich, Eric, Dawn Macaulay, and Lee Ryan. 1994. Mood Dependent Memory for Events of the Personal Past. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 123: 201-215.

Forgas, Joseph P. 1995. Mood and Judgment: The Affect Infusion Model (AIM). Psychological Bulletin 117: 39-66.

Schwarz, Norbert, and Gerald L. Clore. 1983. Mood, Misattribution, and Judgments of Well-being: Informative and Directive Functions of Affective States. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 45: 513-523.

Edward Wisniewski