Figure 2.

Mood Effects on Memory

Note. Three different ways in which mood congruence can impact memory. (A) Example of mood-congruent memory enhancement, reproduced from Ridout et al. (2009) with permission. Mood was induced before encoding. Participants in the negative mood group exhibited improved recognition of sad faces, while no bias was observed for the positive mood group. Negative mood also improved identification of sad faces at encoding (not shown). (B) Example of mood-congruent false memory, reproduced from Bland et al. (2016) with permission. Mood was induced before encoding. The fearful mood group exhibited a bias for falsely recalling critical lures from the fear word lists, while the anger mood group exhibited a bias for falsely recalling critical lures from the anger word lists, and the control group – who experienced no mood induction – showed no bias. (C) Example of both mood-congruent and mood-incongruent memory enhancement, reproduced from Rusting and DeHart (2000) with permission. Participants completed a sentence generation task, followed by a negative mood induction via autobiographical recall. After the induction, participants were instructed to either reappraise the content of the memories that produced their negative mood, continue focusing on the negative memories, or list whatever thoughts were going through their mind (control condition). Free recall performance showed that the positive reappraisal group exhibited mood-incongruent memory only for individuals high in negative mood regulation expectancies (NMR), such that these individuals recalled a greater percentage of positive than negative words from the sentence generation task. Individuals low in NMR, however, exhibited the opposite effect. In the continued focus group, both high and low NMR participants showed mood-congruent recall – as indicated by greater recall of negative words – while the control group showed no biases.