Are real moods required to reveal mood-congruent and mood-dependent memory?

While simulating, or acting as if, they were either happy or sad, university students recounted emotionally positive, neutral, or negative events from their personal past. Two days later, subjects were asked to freely recall the gist of all of these events, and they did so while simulating a mood that either did or did not match the one they had feigned before. By comparing the present results with those of a previous study, in which affectively realistic and subjectively convincing states of happiness and sadness had been engendered experimentally, we searched for—and found—striking differences between simulated and actual moods in their impact on autobiographical memory. In particular, it appears that the mood-congruent effects elicited by simulated moods are qualitatively different from those evoked by induced moods, and that only authentic affects have the power to produce mood-dependent effects.     

Diagnosing agoraphobia in the context of panic disorder: examining the effect of DSM-IV criteria on diagnostic decision-making

A diagnostic and statistical manual (DSM)-IV diagnosis of agoraphobia in the context of panic disorder (PD) is based on three nosologically sufficient criteria: (1) avoidance, (2) use of companions, and (3) endurance of situations despite distress. Therefore, an agoraphobia diagnosis can be made across an extremely broad range of cases including when there are no avoidance behaviors (e.g., the patient endures the situation). It was hypothesized that clinicians do not weight these criteria equally and that the DSMs individual, sufficient criteria lead to poor inter-rater reliability. Clinicians (N=48) rated hypothetical patients with symptom profiles emphasizing each of these three criteria. Consistent with expectation, clinicians differentially weighted these criteria. Avoidance was relatively more apt to produce a diagnosis when only one criterion was emphasized in clinical vignettes. Inter-rater reliability was poor in instances when only one sufficient criterion was highlighted. Knowledge concerning DSM criteria resulted in a greater rate of agoraphobia endorsement, but knowledge did not account for the overall pattern of findings.