Mood-dependent retrieval and mood awareness

Abstract

In six experiments, subjects were induced into happy or sad moods prior to studying a list of words, and then induced into either the same or different mood prior to freely recalling the list. In addition, subjects were administered various individual difference measures of mood states. The hypothesis was that subjects who profess to be most aware of their moods would be most likely to show disrupted performance when study and test moods were different. Mood-dependent performance was not generally observed, nor was there any evidence that it more consistently emerged for high-aware subjects.