Emotion, motivation, and text comprehension: The detection of contradictions in passages.

Abstract

The authors investigated the effects of experimentally induced mood states on the identification of contradictions in text passages and ratings of comprehension in 3 experiments. Mood impaired comprehension in college students across a variety of passages, as evidenced by a depressive impairment in contradiction identification and an increased number of false identifications among depressed participants. Additionally, depressed individuals were less accurate in their judgments of passage difficulty. These findings are consistent with the resource allocation model of mood effects, which attributes impaired comprehension to the activation of intrusive, irrelevant thoughts during reading of the passage. It is further argued that these results cannot be explained simply by a deficit in motivation of the depressed participants.

The Effects of Humorous Literature on Emotion: A Pilot Project Comparing Children with Asperger's Syndrome Before and After Neurofeedback Training and Controls

“…The current study supports past findings (i.e., mixed results), which maintain various theoretical frameworks regarding emotion, literature, and learning such as the effect of message strength, mood-congruent and incongruent learning, and recall of information (Bower et al, 1981;Ellis et al, 1997;Mitchell et al, 2001;Riesberg, 1997). This awareness, that positively toned reading materials can increase PASS emotional states as well as decrease DYS states, can be applied to classrooms and inside the homes.…”

“…The use of reading materials to evoke positive (or negative) emotions is guided by a few theoretical models: the negative state relief model (Mitchell, Brown, Morris-Villagran, & Villagran, 2001), the resource allocation model of mood effects (Riesberg, 1997), and the selective learning and recall model (moodincongruent and congruent learning; Bower, Gilligan, & Monteiro, 1981;Ellis, Ottaway, Varner, Becker, & Moore, 1997). Previous research has found that happy reading materials (such as therapeutic stories) are as effective in reducing negative affect as psychoeducational interventions (Parker, 2004).…”

Selective memory and memory deficits in depressed inpatients

“…However, there are also experimental results that indicate that depression is not always associated with impaired memory performance or that it is associated with impaired performance on some memory tasks and not on others [Ellis et al, 1997;Gotlib et al, 1996;von Hecker et al, 2000]. Recently, dif ferent models were proposed to explain the partial occurrence of explicit and implicit memory deficits in depression.…”

The cognitive-initiative account of depression-related impairments in memory

“…Hertel and Rude (1991a,b) surmised that the constraints on attention during initial exposure to target materials were lax; we therefore tightened the demands of the orienting task by requiring sustained attention to the targets and thereby remediated the deficit in subsequent recall. In contrast, the pretask instructions given by Ellis et al (1997) might not have served the purpose of guiding participants to engage in beneficial procedures during the task itself. In short, "depression-induced" participants were encouraged to let their minds wander, and attention was not focused by specific response requirements as the task proceeded.…”