Figure 1.

Models of Mood and Memory

Note. (A) Proposed influences of induced mood on each stage of the memory process. Mood selectively enhances attention, storage, and search processes to promote biased memory for mood-congruent material. Although most MCM research focuses on encoding or retrieval congruency, mood may also shift consolidation processes in a mood-congruent manner. (B) Illustration of the associative network theory of memory and emotion proposed by Bower (1981). Happy and sad affect are depicted alongside some of their associated nodes, including expressive behaviors, autonomic responses, verbal labels (e.g., joyful/cheery or depressed/miserable) and memories for mood-congruent events. When a mood node is activated, activation will spread along these established links to neighboring nodes. Emotions with opposing valence have inhibitory connections, such that a sad mood will inhibit happiness and its associated links. (C) The Dual-Force Model from Fiedler (1991, 2002) suggests that assimilative processes transform learned input into existing knowledge structures, whereas accommodative processes facilitate attentive and accurate encoding with relatively little transformation. Positive moods signal safety and activate assimilative processes that improve performance on generative tasks, whereas negative moods signal uncertainty and activate accommodative processes that facilitate item-specific processing. (D) The Affect Infusion Model from Forgas (1995) proposes four processing strategies that can be used when making judgements, which theoretically also influences memory. Affect infusion (mood-related effects) is most likely during heuristic processing (when mood is the direct source of judgement) and substantive processing (when elaborate, generative processes assimilate information into existing knowledge structures). By contrast, affect infusion is low during direct access processing (when evaluations are made from existing, crystallized judgements) or motivational processing (when specific goals guide task engagement, such as with mood repair).