Mood, Cognition, and Memory

Abstract

The interplay between feeling and thinking, affect and cognition, has been a subject of scholarly discussion and spirited debate since antiquity. Within the past 25 years, the affect/cognition interface has also emerged as one of the most active and rapidly developing areas within psychological science. Two phenomena that have attracted much modern interest are mood congruence—the observation that a given affect state or mood promotes the processing of information that possesses a similar affective tone or valence, and mood‐dependence—the observation that information encoded in a particular mood is most retrievable in that mood, irrespective of the information's affective valence. This chapter examines the history and current status of research on mood congruence and mood dependence with a view to clarifying what is known about each of these phenomena, and why they are both worth knowing about. Particular consideration is given to the role of different information‐processing strategies in the occurrence of mood‐congruent and mood‐dependent effects, and to the way these effects may materialize in realistic everyday situations or clinical contexts.

Teachers’ Perceptions about the Use of Background Music in Preschool Free Play Time

“…On the other hand, teachers who used background music perceived the music as relaxing and facilitating a positive mood. Other previous studies are supportive of such a stance concerning background music (Hallam et al, 2002;Love & Burns, 2007), such as related to music's power for emotional arousal and release (Egermann et al, 2015;Sims Cecconi-Roberts, 2005) and to influence mood positively (Eich & Forgas, 2003). Further study should examine the real effect of background music on children's play in a classroom setting, in order to find out whether teachers' perceptions of background music is evidence based or overestimated.…”

“…Hallam et al (2002), for example, suggested that music's reported effects are mediated by their impact on levels of arousal and emotional state rather than affecting cognition directly. Also, music is reported to induce universal emotional arousal (Egermann, Fernando, Chuen, & McAdams, 2015) and influence mood (Eich & Forgas, 2003;Saarikallio, 2008). In a similar line, Ziv & Goshen (2006) found that background music affected five-to six year-old children's interpretation of stories in terms of emotion, such as happy and sad.…”

Emotional word usage in groups at risk for schizophrenia-spectrum disorders: An objective investigation of attention to emotion

“…For example, there has been evidence suggesting mood may facilitate mood-congruent information recall (e.g., Bower, 1981; Eich and Forgas, 2003; Mayer et al, 1995) and that affective states orient attention toward information, which could explain current feelings (Wyer and Carlston, 1979). Unlike healthy controls, responses by participants in at-risk groups did not show a bias for mood-congruent language, suggesting their mood state might not facilitate recall for similar experiences nor guide attention toward information able to account for positive affect.…”

Event centrality of positive and negative autobiographical memories to identity and life story across cultures

“…Mood-dependent memory, in combination with rehearsal effects, also may help explain why individuals whose negative event was more central to their lives experienced more symptoms of PTSD and depression. According to several studies (Eich & Forgas, 2003;Kihlstrom et al, 2000;Taylor, 1991;Watkins, 2002), individuals with depression tend to retrieve more negative information than individuals with no depression. For individuals with emotional distress, higher rates of retrieval of negative memories would increase rehearsal, and therefore, contribute to higher event centrality of these highly rehearsed negative events.…”