Mood congruence effect in autobiographical recall: Is mood a mediator?

Abstract

In the present study we test the hypothesis that the effect of mood congruence in autobiographical recall is underlain by mood. Thirty-eight female participants were subjected to positive, negative and neutral mood inductions, and then asked to recall three personal memories. Participants’ mood was assessed using self-report questionnaires and by electromyograph (EMG) measurements of corrugator supercilii and zygomaticus major muscle activity. We replicated the congruence effect between the mood inductions and the valence of the participants’ recalled memories. Furthermore, this effect was mediated by mood, as measured by EMG and self-report questionnaires. The results suggest that mood influences the mood congruence effect in a way that cannot be explained by semantic priming alone

Mood-congruent memory revisited.

“…Others observed increases in proportion rates for recalling positive/negative memories in a congruent versus incongruent mood in the range of .07–0.156 (e.g., Berntsen, 2002; Bullington, 1990; Ehrlichman & Halpern, 1988; Sakaki, 2007). Several studies have also indicated that mood shifts the valence of recalled memories in a mood-congruent direction (Drače, 2013; Drače & Desrichard, 2013; Drače et al, 2015), although such effects may not only influence memories for mood-congruent cues. Miranda and Kihlstrom (2005), for example, showed that memories recalled for positive, negative, or neutral cues were all rated as more or less pleasant depending on the induced mood state, indicating a generalized mood-congruent shift in the phenomenological experience of memory recall.…”

Analyzing the effects of memory biases and mood disorders on social performance

“…Neuroimaging studies examining the influence of emotion in encoding and retrieval also provide evidence in support of this 75 , 76 . Further, recent empirical studies based on human participants also offer support to this theory 77 . However, there seem to be no computational models of this phenomenon.…”

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“…If this was the case, it would mean that the BMIS was merely an indirect measure of the semantic aspects activated by the situation: a hypothesis that seems to be disproved by several factors. For example, Drace and Desrichard (2013) found that BMIS correlated with a non-verbal measure of affect (i.e., EMG activity of muscles corrugator supercilia and zygomaticus major) that should be less sensitive to semantic priming and that both measures mediated the relation between mood inductions and autobiographical recall. On the other side, the BMIS has been found to be sensitive to mood manipulation using a variety of induction procedures, even those with low semantic content (e.g., Niedenthal & Setterlund, 1994).…”

“…When addressing this question, researchers have usually tried to isolate the influence of the affective state by selecting mood induction procedures that are not supposed to activate semantic concepts, congruent with the material to be recalled. However, as suggested by some authors (e.g., Drace & Desrichard, 2013) there are two problems with this approach. First, studies of this type often produce contradictory findings, with some concluding that the mood congruence effect is not caused by an individual's affective state (Mayer, Gayle, Meehan, & Haarman, 1990;Rholes et al, 1987;Riskind, 1983;Riskind, Rholes, & Eggers, 1982), and others suggesting the opposite (Ehrlichman & Halpren, 1988;Kumari, Hemsley, Cotter, Checkley, & Grey, 1998;Schnall & Laird, 2003).…”