The effect of autobiographical recall judgments about emotional episode sentences on mood congruent memory

Abstract

Mood-congruent memory refers to the phenomenon of facilitated encoding for material that is congruent with a person's mood. Results of several studies have shown that an autobiographical recall task that participants recall episodes corresponding to a stimulus facilitates mood-congruent encoding. However, the possibility exists that episodes recalled from the stimulus differ among participants. For the present study, which used emotional episodes to preclude that possibility, 45 participants were assigned randomly to one of three induced mood groups (positive, negative, or neutral). They listened to music, which induced moods for positive and negative mood groups. Participants in each condition were presented with 10 pleasant and 10 unpleasant episodes at 6-s intervals. Mood-congruent memory was observed in both positive and negative moods.