Mood Group Research Articles

Emotion recognition as a function of social connpetence and depressed mood in Individuals with intellectual disability

The present study was designed to test whether social competence and mood were predictive of the performance by adults with mild or moderate intellectual disability on a matching-to-sample task using facially expressed emotions as stimuli. Thirty-eight subjects were assigned to either a depressed mood group or a non-depressed mood group based on their scores on the two depression sub-scales of the Reiss Screen for Maladaptive Behavior. The groups were matched on sex, age and level of intellectual disability. Each group consisted of 10 women and nine men; 12 participants in each group had mild and seven had moderate intellectual disability, respectively. Social competence was assessed with the Social Performance Survey Schedule (SPSS). Performance on the matching-to-sample task correlated positively with the subjects' level of intellectual disability, their mood scores and the scores on the Appropriate Skills sub-scale of the SPSS. The implications of these findings for social skills training programmes and limitations of this study are discussed.

Effects of Emotional Mood States in Recognizing Places

The effects of emotional mood states on remembering scenes along a route of travel were examined in two experiments. For Experiment 1, 48 participants were exposed to a route of travel following a sad, happy, or neutral mood-induction procedure. Process dissociation (Jacoby, 1991) was used to derive separate estimates of the relative roles of conscious recollection and sense of familiarity (unconscious retrieval) in recognizing scenes. Conscious recollection, but not familiarity, was adversely affected by being in an emotional mood state during exposure. For Experiment 2, 24 participants given neutral mood induction were divided according to self-reports of induced mood. Participants in the sad mood group selected more old frames such as "looking sad" in a later test of implicit memory (unconscious retrieval) than did those in the happy mood group. These results reinforced that researchers must address diverse memory processes to understand the role of emotional mood states in spatial cognition.

Effects of induced dysphoric mood on fact retrieval and inferential reasoning from world knowledge

World knowledge stimuli were used to investigate the effects of an induced dysphoric mood on fact retrieval and inferential reasoning processes. Sixty young adults were divided randomly into three mood groups (elated, neutral, and dysphoric). The subjects in each group read a different set of 30 sentences, each set designed to induce a specific mood. Two world knowledge question types were then presented, one designed to induce fact retrieval alone and the other designed to induce inferential reasoning. Significant differences for question type were found, with inference questions requiring longer response times and being rated as involving more complex processing than fact retrieval questions. However, groups were not significantly different for number of correct responses, confidence levels, introspective process ratings, or speed of response for either type of question. Thus, induced dysphoric mood did not produce a significant negative impact on utilization of world knowledge.

The Relationship of Depressed Mood and Life Stress to Maternal Perceptions of Child Behavior

Used an analog design to explore the role played by depressed mood and by two levels of contextual stress—major life events and minor daily stressors—to determine maternal perceptions of and anticipated affective and behavioral responses to child behavior. Sixty-six single mothers responded to 12 descriptions of child behavior, each embedded in one of three stress contexts (i. e., major life events, minor daily stressors, or no stress). Scores on a measure of depressed mood were used to divide the sample into depressed and nondepressed mood groups. Analyses revealed that mothers were more affectively aroused, indicated a more intense anticipated behavioral reaction, and perceived the child behavior to be more deviant in the minor daily stressors condition compared to the other stress conditions. Only affective responses to child behavior were significantly different between the mood groups. Implications for understanding intraparent and contextual contributors to parent-child interaction difficulties are discussed.

Mood and constructive memory effects on social judgement

Abstract Based on a theoretical model of the mood-cognition interface, the prediction is derived and tested empirically that positive mood enhances constructive memory biases. After reading an ambiguous personality description, participants received a positive or negative mood treatment employing different films. Within each mood group, half of the participants were then questioned about the applicability of either desirable or undesirable personality traits to the target person. This questioning treatment was predicted to bias subsequent impression judgements in the evaluative direction of the questioned attributes. As earlier research had shown that such a bias is stronger for negative than positive attributes (presumably because of the higher diagnosticity of negative attributes), a non-trivial test of the sup posed mood effect was possible. Positive mood should enhance constructive effects, but this should be most apparent for negative attributes. The empirical findings lend support to these predictions. Positive mood subjects' impression judgements were biased by the prior questioning even when they did not find the questioned attributes to be particularly applicable to the target person. By contrast, negative mood subjects' judgements were more consistent with their responses to the prior questioning and did not exhibit a constructive bias.

Psychological dimensions in patients with disabling tinnitus and craniomandibular disorders

Forty-two patients with severe tinnitus and craniomandibular disorders (CMD) are presented from an audiological and psychological point of view. During a 2-week period, the patients rated their mood and their tinnitus. Based upon mood ratings, patients were grouped into three clusters (high, medium and low mood). The three groups differed in a number of respects, audiological as well as psychological. Patients in the low mood group experienced significantly more intense and severe tinnitus and more daily stress than patients in the high mood group. Ratings of irritation and concentration difficulties seemed to be mood related, and discriminated between patients in the low mood group and patients in the moderate and the high mood groups. Difference in hearing level between the left and the right ear was more pronounced in patients with low mood. There were, however, no significant differences between the groups in the stomatognathic variables. It is concluded that the above mentioned audiological and psychological observations should be considered as potentially important for satisfactory management of individual tinnitus patients. Further studies of the effects of optimally compensated hearing on depressed mood in patients with noise-induced hearing loss (NIHL) and tinnitus are required.

Mood induction and the priming of semantic memory in a lexical decision task: Asymmetric effects of elation and depression

A number of predictions derived from Bower’s (1981) associative network model of mood and memory were investigated by inducing elated, neutral, or depressed moods in different groups of subjects. A mood-evaluation checklist verified the success of the mood-induction procedure. While in induced moods, subjects performed a lexical decision task in which the target stimuli were positive or negative trait adjectives, neutral nontrait adjectives, or nonwords. As predicted, subjects in elated moods showed facilitated processing of positive target words relative to processing of negative and neutral target words. Contrary to prediction, subjects in depressed moods did not respond faster to negative target words than they did to positive target words. Following the lexical decision task, subjects were administered an incidental free recall test for the words presented during the lexical decision task. Contrary to prediction, the three mood groups recalled similar numbers of words for each type of word target category. The asymmetric effects of elation and depression on memory that were observed in this study and a number of other studies are discussed.

Self-Initiated Imaginal and Cognitive Components: Evaluation of Differential Effectiveness in Altering Unpleasant Moods

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the differential effectiveness of brief cognitive and imaginal techniques in the alleviation of experientially induced anger and sadness. Thirty-two male and female undergraduates recruited from an introductory psychology course were randomly assigned to one of two mood groups (i.e., anger or sadness) and either of two treatment orders (i.e., cognitive-imagery; imagery-cognitive). Likert-type scales were used to assess mood level at pre and posttreatments. Results indicate: self-initiated statements and self-generated images were both effective in altering unpleasant moods. Moreover, a significant order by repeated measures interaction suggests that treatment effectiveness is enhanced when personal images precede personal cognitions. Categorical analyses of imaginal and cognitive themes suggested that some classes of imaginal and cognitive themes were superior to others in reducing unpleasant affect.

Mood, self-awareness, and willingness to help.

Two experiments using female subjects investigated the effects of mood and self-focused attention on the willingness to help another. Experiment 1 induced a positive, negative, or neutral mood and also two kinds of high self-awareness (by either the mirror procedure or requiring essays) as well as a low self-awareness condition. Experiment 2 used a different technique to induce the three moods and also established either high or low attention to the self with the mirror procedure. In both studies, self-awareness did not interact significantly with mood in affecting the subjects' reported feelings, although there were indications in Experiment 2 of an intensification of the negative mood under self-focus. Furthermore, in both studies self-awareness operated together with the positive mood to increase the subjects' effort in behalf of the supplicant, whereas the joint operation of self-focus and negative mood was much weaker. Also in the second experiment, self-awareness raised the frequency of positive ideas about the self in the happy subjects and increased the frequency of negative selfideas in the negative mood group. In a multiple regression analysis, these frequencies of positive and negative ideas about the self, but not a mood index, successfully predicted the amount of work the subjects did for the supplicant.

Descriptive validity of DSM-III depressions.

There are five categories of psychiatric disorders in DSM-III that embrace depressive moods: adjustment disorder with depressed mood (group 1), bipolar depression (group 2), major depression (group 3), dysthymic disorder (group 4), and atypical depression (group 5). A large sample of patients seen in a metropolitan university psychiatric referral center, with these categories as primary diagnoses in axis I, constitute the subjects studied (N = 2988). The study includes a comparison of the cross-sectional clinical properties of these patients, including an inventory of psychopathological symptoms, entries in axes II to V (i.e., as described in DSM-III, plus a sixth axis measuring current adjustment) and immediate dispositions rendered by clinicians. This study addresses the descriptive validity of DSM-III diagnostic categories of depression. A clustering of depressions based on a continuum of severity is uncovered as well as unique features of certain subtypes that point to categorical aspects of DSM-III mood disorders. The nature and implication of these findings are discussed.

Affect and the processing of personal information: Evidence for mood-activated self-schemata

The present research tested whether mood states influence the schematic processing of self-referent material. It was hypothesized that mood states activate mood-congruent self-schemata that facilitate the encoding and processing of mood-compatible personal information. To test the hypothesis, positive and negative mood states were experimentally induced in naturally nondepressed persons prior to the encoding phase of a depth-of-processing task and immediately before an incidental recall test was administered. In support of the mood-activation hypothesis, persons receiving the sad mood induction at encoding subsequently recalled more negatively valenced self-referent traits than did those receiving the happy mood induction. However, recall for positive traits did not differ between the two mood groups. Supplemental analyses suggested that the emotional states engendered by the mood manipulations played a direct role in the schematic processing of self-referent material. The relevance of the findings to current theories of the self, memory, and depression are considered.