Emotional mood states and memory: elaborative encoding, semantic processing, and cognitive effort

The effects of experimentally induced mood states on recall of target words embedded in sentences or alone were examined in three experiments. All experiments focused on the role of a depressed-mood induction on recall and looked at the effects of elaborative encoding, semantic processing, or cognitive effort. The overall effect of the depressed-mood state was to reduce recall in all three situations; however, the opportunity to process information semantically still led to superior recall in the depressed condition. In contrast, the superiority of recall of high-effort items disappeared in the depressed condition, suggesting that subjects may differentially allocate resources when under a depressed-mood state. The results are briefly discussed within the framework of a resource allocation theory.     

Influence of emotional state on irrelevant thoughts

The fan effect paradigm was used to investigate the influence of emotional mood state on longterm memory retrieval (Anderson, 1983). Subjects learned target facts embedded in unrelated sentences to a specified criterion and were then given a happy, sad, or neutral mood induction. Mean response times (RTs) and error rates were analyzed in a speeded recognition test in which subjects distinguished between the learned facts and foil facts (foil facts were constructed by recombining the same concepts). A follow-up lexical decision task indicated that mean RT was positively correlated with an increase in the weighted proportion of irrelevant thoughts produced by subjects in an induced sad mood. Results suggest that irrelevant thoughts associated with the sad mood state interfered with more relevant, task-oriented, thoughts and support the notion that sad mood is related to a failure to inhibit irrelevant information.     

Emotion and prior knowledge in memory and judged comprehension of ambiguous stories

Abstract

Two experiments investigated the effects of experimentally induced mood states on memory and judged comprehension of stories. The experiments examined the issue of whether induction of a depressed mood would affect prose memory and comprehension and impair the ability of individuals to use prior knowledge, activated by way of a title, in remembering the passage. In Experiment 1, depressed subjects who were given a title for the passage recalled fewer idea units when compared with neutral control conditions, but no depressive deficit in recall occurred in the absence of a title. In Experiment 2 the same pattern of results occurred when subjects learned two successive passages. The depressive deficits obtained were interpreted in terms of a resource allocation model which proposes that emotional states increase the production of irrelevant, competing thoughts that interfere with processes important in remembering the criterion passage. Alternative explanations involving cognitive initiative and schema theory were discussed. Finally, judgments of comprehension predicted passage recall and were better predictors for neutral than depressed mood subjects. A depressed mood state did not affect average judgments of comprehension even when recall was correspondingly impaired.     

Emotional states and memory biases: effects of cognitive priming and mood

Recent studies have shown that naturally occurring and experimentally induced affect states enhance the accessibility to retrieval of memories of life experiences that are congruent in valence with the affect state. Previous studies have suggested that this memory bias results from the influence of affective processes on memory retrieval. In our study we manipulated mood state by having subjects read statements expressing positive or negative self-evaluative ideas or describing somatic states that often accompany positive or negative mood states. The somatic and self-evaluative statements had, in general, equally strong effects on mood state. In spite of this, however, the self-evaluative statements had a stronger impact on recall latencies for life experiences than did the somatic statements. Moreover, the impact of the self-evaluative, but not the somatic, statements on recall was found to be independent of the statements' effects on mood state. This suggests that the cognitions accompanying a mood-altering experience may have a substantial effect on the capacity of the mood state to influence memory retrieval.     

Mood, memory, and social judgments in children

The influence of positive and negative moods on children's recall and recognition memory and impression-formation judgments was investigated in a two-list experimental design. A total of 161 schoolchildren, 8 to 10 years old, were presented with audiovisual information containing positive and negative details about 2 target children. Each presentation was preceded by happy or sad mood manipulations. One day later, the children were again placed in a happy or sad mood, and their recall and recognition memory and impression-formation judgments were assessed. Results showed that memory was better when (a) the children felt happy during encoding, retrieval, or both; (b) the material was incongruent with learning mood; (c) the 2 target characters were encountered in contrasting rather than in matching mood states; and (d) recall mood matched encoding mood. A happy mood increased the extremity of both positive and negative impression-formation judgments. Results are contrasted with experimental data obtained with normal or depressed adults, and implications are considered for contemporary theories of mood effects on cognition and for social-developmental research.     

Two Types of Conditioned Reflex and a Pseudo Type

Although it is widely known that memory is enhanced when encoding and retrieval occur in the same state, the impact of elevated stress/arousal is less understood. This study explores mood-dependent memory's effects on visual recognition and recall of material memorized either in a neutral mood or under higher stress/arousal levels. Participants’ (N = 60) recognition and recall were assessed while they experienced either the same or a mismatched mood at retrieval. The results suggested that both visual recognition and recall memory were higher when participants experienced the same mood at encoding and retrieval compared with those who experienced a mismatch in mood context between encoding and retrieval. These findings offer support for a mood dependency effect on both the recognition and recall of visual information.     

Mood and memories of parental rearing styles: A comparison of mood effects on questionnaire-cued and free recall of autobiographical memories

The relationship between memories of childhood experiences (e.g., adverse parenting) and adult depression often found raises questions of interpretation. On the one hand, both laboratory studies and clinicians' experiences suggest that subjects in a depressed mood frequently show a negative bias in perceptions and memories. Negative childhood memories in depressed persons might, therefore, be interpreted as epiphenomena of depressed mood instead of etiological factors. On the other hand, memories of childhood experiences seem remarkably stable across changes in depressed mood, especially when memories are elicited by means of standardized questionnaires. In the mood and memory literature several explanations for this stability are offered. For one thing, highly structured cues to elicit memories (such as in questionnaires) are hypothesized to be less susceptible to mood bias than unstructured memory cues (such as in free recall procedures). On the other hand, resource allocation theorists suggest that childhood memories, being well established and rehearsed, are relatively impervious to mood bias no matter how they are elicited. In this study we examined whether different methods of eliciting childhood memories (i.e., free recall and questionnaire-cued) are differentially susceptible to mood bias. To this aim, we used a mood induction procedure to induce depressed, neutral, and elated mood and assessed childhood memories both before and after the mood induction using both questionnaires and free recall to elicit memories. Results suggested that memories elicited by means of free recall as well as by means of questionnaire-cued recall were susceptible to depressed and elated mood bias. The implications for research addressing the link between childhood experiences and depression are discussed.     

The effect of depressed mood on the interpretation of ambiguity,with and without negative mood induction

Is there an effect of depressed mood on the interpretation of ambiguity? Are depressed individuals biased to interpret ambiguous information in a negative manner? We used a cross-modal semantic priming task to look for evidence of a negative interpretative bias. Participants listened to ambiguous prime sentences (e.g., Joan was stunned by her final exam mark) and made lexical decisions to target words presented immediately after the sentence offset or after a delay of 1000 ms or 2000 ms. For the semantically related targets, the target was negatively related (distress), positively related (success), or neutrally related (grades) to the ambiguous prime. The experiment was conducted with and without a negative mood induction. The expectation was that depressed participants would be more likely to consider the negative interpretations of the ambiguous primes and would therefore experience larger priming effects for negatively related targets. Although there were large priming effects for all semantically related targets, there was no evidence of a negative interpretative bias.     

Predicting depression using earliest childhood memories

In order to investigate the utility of earliest childhood memories (EMs) in clinical assessment, this study investigated the value of EMs in predicting naturally occurring depressive mood states. Of interest were those features of EMs that discriminate depressed from nondepressed individuals. Subjects were 212 undergraduate volunteers who completed the Beck Depression Inventory, the Profile of Mood States, and a self-administered EM questionnaire. Utilizing thematic predictors derived from cognitive and psychodynamic theories of depression, depressed subjects were differentiated from nondepressed subjects at a rate significantly greater than chance, p less than .001, with a highly respectable estimate of cross-validation shrinkage. The findings demonstrate the phenomenon of mood dependent recall in autobiographical memory, namely, that memory attributes are strongly influenced by current mood state. Consistent with psychodynamic theories of depression and in contrast to cognitive theory, depressive mood states appear to facilitate retrieval of memory schemas involving deprivation and disturbing human interaction. Schemas involving loss of control, failure, or reactions to noncontingent reinforcement (perceptions of the self as agent) appear less salient than relationship schemas (perceptions of the self as related) in depressive experience.     

Is retrieving positive self-concordant specific memory beneficial to mood repair? The moderation effect of depressive symptoms

The present study examined whether positive specific memory recall improves mood more than overgeneral memory recall. Moreover, this study examined the mood contrast effect in subclinically depressed participants. The mood contrast effect refers to when people ruminate on discrepancies between the current self and a past ideal self by recall of positive self-discrepant (low self-concordant) memories and thereby, fall into a negative mood. Undergraduate students (N?=?161) underwent a negative mood induction, and then concentrated on positive specific memory recall, positive overgeneral memory recall, or distraction. Results showed that there were no group differences in mood repair. Nevertheless, recalled memory self-concordance was associated with sad mood repair in the specific memory group, and moreover, this effect was not significant in people high in depressive symptoms. We discussed the results of mood repair effect from the perspective of baseline negative mood in subclinical depression.     

The effect of mood-context on visual recognition and recall memory

Although it is widely known that memory is enhanced when encoding and retrieval occur in the same state, the impact of elevated stress/arousal is less understood. This study explores mood-dependent memory's effects on visual recognition and recall of material memorized either in a neutral mood or under higher stress/arousal levels. Participants' (N = 60) recognition and recall were assessed while they experienced either the same o a mismatched mood at retrieval. The results suggested that both visual recognition and recall memory were higher when participants experienced the same mood at encoding and retrieval compared with those who experienced a mismatch in mood context between encoding and retrieval. These findings offer support for a mood dependency effect on both the recognition and recall of visual information.     

Mood and the self-reference bias in recall

Hypotheses linking a negative recall bias (or negative self-schema) with vulnerability to depression were tested using an experimental mood-induction task. Extent of bias in student subjects was found to be unstable over a 4-month period, but different measures of memory bias within one session were highly correlated. Marginally significant correlations in the expected direction were found between estimates of recall bias and mood state, whether measured at the same or at different times. Change in mood following induction did not relate to change in bias, suggesting that the observed differences in recall are not a simple function of transient mood state alone. Equally, the initial recall bias did not predict the extent of mood shift following induction, as would be expected if a negative self-schema determined ease of mood shift in a negative direction. However, significant correlations were found between negative recall bias and self-reported frequency and severity of depression, lending equivocal support to the negative self-schema model.     

Effects of induced elation-depression on the accessibility of memories of happy and unhappy experiences

Elated and depressed moods were induced in student volunteers on separate occasions. On each occasion they retrieved past real-life experiences associated to stimulus words presented. Subjects subsequently rated the experiences for happiness-unhappiness and pleasantness-unpleasantness on a third occasion in a neutral mood state. Extremely unhappy memories were significantly more likely to be retrieved in the depressed mood than in the elated mood. Extremely happy memories were significantly more likely to be retrieved in the elated mood than in the depressed mood. Measures of latency of retrieval showed a significant interaction between mood state and type of memory. The results confirm the generality of previous findings in suggesting an effect of mood state on the accessibility of different types of cognition. The results are considered in relation to mood as a context in contextual-specific encoding and retrieval, and in relation to models and treatment of clinical conditions.     

A multinomial modeling analysis of the mnemonic benefits of bizarre imagery

A series of experiments was conducted to explore the cognitive processes that mediate the bizarreness effect, that is, the finding that bizarre or unusual imagery is recalled better than common imagery. In all experiments, subjects were presented with noun pairs that were embedded within bizarre or common sentences ina mixed-list design. None of the experiments produced a bizarrenesB effect for cued recall; however, for two of the experiments, the bizarre noun pairs were remembered significantly better than the common pairs for free recall. To determine if these differences were due to the storage or retrieval of the items, a multinomial model for the analyis of imagery mediation in paired-associate learning was developed and applied to the data from the experiments. The model revealed that bizarre sentences benefited the retrieval of the noun pairs but not their storage within memory. The empirical and modeling results are discussed relative to previous findings and theories on thebizarreness effect.     

Depression,restraint and eating behavior

Contrary to the belief that weight loss is a principal symptom of depression, several recent studies have suggested that certain people gain rather than lose weight when depressed. The present experiment concerned the effects of experimentally induced mood states on the eating behavior of high- and low-restraint persons. Sixty-eight female undergraduates were randomly assigned to one of three groups each designed to induce a different mood state (depressed, neutral or elated), and were classified as high or low restraint based on their responses to a questionnaire. During the mood induction procedure subjects were provided with the opportunity to eat. High-restraint persons induced into a depressed mood ate significantly more than high-restraint persons induced into neutral or elated moods, and more than low-restraint persons induced into a depressed mood. This effect was most prominent among subjects who scored high on the weight-fluctuation factor of the restraint scale. There was no evidence that this effect occurred among subjects who scored high on the concern for dieting factor. The role of emotional arousal on the self-control over eating behavior of high weight-fluctuation persons, and the implications of these findings for the evaluation of depression were discussed.     

情绪对提取诱发遗忘的影响

从学习材料的情绪性和提取过程的情绪状态两方面考察了情绪对提取诱发遗忘的影响。结果发现提取练习对情绪性与非情绪性材料引发了同等程度的遗忘;提取练习阶段,当被试处于正性或中性情绪状态下也会发生明显的提取诱发遗忘现象,而当被试处于负性情绪状态时,提取练习不会导致对未提取项目的遗忘。研究结果表明,学习材料的情绪性不影响提取诱发遗忘,而提取过程的情绪状态会对提取诱发遗忘产生影响,负性情绪状态可以消除提取诱发遗忘。     

Memory for sentences: The subject superiority effect

Three experiments are reported on subject noun superiority in cued recall from S-V-O sentences. In Experiment I surface subjects were superior cues across a wide variety of conditions when the order of nouns/pronouns was matched in sentences and probes. The effect was less clear-cut in Experiment II, when cues and responses were confined to single key words.

The final experiment showed that cue superiority depends on the cue which subjects learn to use in retrieving information from sentences, and can be reversed by brief training. Several other aspects of the results, including a contrast in recall and recognition patterns, suggest that subject cue superiority results from the way subjects process remembered sentences rather than from memory trace structure. It is suggested that failure to control the utilisation of cues for memory retrieval may account for the sometimes elusive nature of the subject superiority effect.     

Mood repair and processing mode in depression

Recalling positive autobiographical memories is a powerful emotion regulation strategy that can be used to repair low mood and alleviate negative affect. Unlike healthy individuals, those with current or past depression do not experience an improvement in mood as a consequence of recalling positive memories. We tested whether differences in processing mode might account for this impairment. Following mood induction procedures designed to ensure equivalence of mood state, depressed (n = 35) and recovered depressed (n = 33) participants were instructed to recall a positive memory and focus on it while adopting either an abstract or a concrete mode of processing. Participants in the abstract processing condition experienced no change in mood, while those in the concrete processing condition showed improved mood after memory recall. This research illustrates that the process by which positive autobiographical memories are recalled is important in determining their emotional impact and suggests that psychological interventions for depression may be improved by explicitly targeting processing mode.