CHAPTER 3
Mood, Cognition, and Memory
ERIC EICH AND JOSEPH P. FORGAS
61MOOD CONGRUENCE 61
Early Theories of Mood Congruence 62
Contemporary Cognitive Theories 63
Toward an Integrative Theory: The Affect
Infusion Model 65
Evidence Relating Processing Strategies to Mood
Congruence 66
Mood Congruence in Social Behaviors 69
Synopsis 70
MOOD DEPENDENCE 70
Cognitive Perspectives on Mood Dependence 72
Clinical Perspectives on Mood Dependence 76
Closing Comments 79
REFERENCES 80Recent years have witnessed a mounting interest in the
impact of happiness, sadness, and other affective states or
moods on learning, memory, decision making, and allied
cognitive processes. Much of this interest has focused on two
phenomena:mood-congruent cognition,the observation that
a given mood promotes the processing of information that
possesses a similar affective tone or valence, and mood-
dependent memory,the observation that information encoded
in a particular mood is most retrievable in that mood, irre-
spective 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.
MOOD CONGRUENCE
The interplay between feeling and thinking, affect and cogni-
tion, has been a subject of scholarly discussion and spirited
debate since antiquity. From Plato to Pascal, a long line of
Western philosophers have proposed that “passions” have a
potentially dangerous, invasive influence on rational think-
ing, an idea that re-emerged in Freud’s psychodynamic the-
ories. However, recent advances in cognitive psychology and
neuroscience have promoted the radically different view that
affect is often a useful and even essential component of adap-
tive social thinking (Adolphs & Damasio, 2001; Cosmides &
Tooby, 2000).
The research to be reviewed in this section shows that
affective states often produce powerful assimilative or con-
gruent effects on the way people acquire, remember, and
interpret information. However, we will also see that these
effects are not universal, but depend on a variety of situa-
tional and contextual variables that recruit different informa-
tion-processing strategies. Accordingly, one of the main aims
of modern research, and of this review, is to clarify why
mood-congruent effects emerge under certain circumstances
but not others.
To this end, we begin by recapping two early theoretical
perspectives on mood congruence (one based on psychoana-
lytic constructs, the other on principles of conditioning)
and then turn to two more recent accounts (affect priming and
affect-as-information). Next, we outline an integrative theory
that is designed to explain the different ways in which affect
can have an impact on cognition in general, and social cogni-
tion in particular. Finally, empirical evidence is examined
which elucidates the essential role that different processing
strategies play in the occurrence—or nonoccurrence—of
mood congruence.This chapter was prepared with the aid of grants to the first author
from the National Institute of Mental Health and the Natural Sci-
ences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and by awards to
the second author from the Australian Research Council and the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The chapter also profited from
the expert advice and assistance provided by Joseph Ciarrochi, Dawn
Macaulay, Stephanie Moylan, Patrick Vargas, and Joan Webb.