Emotion, Mood, and Memory | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

A clear example of mood-congruent interpretation can be seen in research conducted by Michael Eysenck and his colleagues (1987): Anxious participants, more often than nonanxious participants, spelled spoken homophones (such as die and dye) to coincide with the more threatening concept. Andrew Mathews and his associates (1989) found similar mood-congruent interpretation on a test of implicit memory. In this test, the participants were shown the first three letters of words and were asked to complete them to form the first word that came to mind. The anxious subjects completed with threat-related words that they had seen in an earlier task more often than other types of previously seen and unseen words; nonanxious subjects did not show this bias. As they occur in both initial encounters and later indirect tests of memory, these biased interpretations occur automatically or without any intent to focus on mood related meaning.

On more direct tests of memory, such as tests of explicit recall, anxious people do not always remember anxiety-related material better than other material, perhaps because they turn their attention away from anxiety-provoking stimuli, once they are conceived.

This page contains 180 words.