Emotion, Mood, and Memory

Emotion, Mood, and Memory

The ways in which we attend, learn, and remember are related to our transitory moods and to our enduring emotional states. Intuitively appealing to the self-reflective person, this claim has been verified by experimental and clinical psychologists in both laboratory and naturalistic studies. In some studies, psychologists measure differences in emotional states and determine whether those differences are associated with differences in the ways that the participants perform cognitive tasks. These studies usually focus on unpleasant emotions and moods, such as depression and anxiety. In other studies, psychologists attempt to induce either unpleasant or pleasant moods in the participants (perhaps by having them listen to different types of music) and then examine how performance is affected by these manipulations. Both types of research have tried to answer two major questions about the interaction of mood and memory: Do people remember events that are emotionally consistent with their moods better than other events? Do depressed and anxious moods hinder performance on neutral cognitive tasks?

Mood-Congruent Memory

People remember episodes and materials that are consistent with their moods more often than they remember other occurrences; this phenomenon is known as mood-congruent memory (MCM). MCM can sometimes be attributed to the ways that people initially interpret the events to be remembered because interpretations tend to be mood-congruent.

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