62 Mood, Cognition, and Memory
Early Theories of Mood Congruence
Philosophers, politicians, and playwrights alike have recog-
nized for centuries the capacity of moods to color the way
people remember the past, experience the present, and fore-
cast the future. Psychologists, however, were relatively late
to acknowledge this reality, despite a number of promising
early leads (e.g., Rapaport, 1942/1961; Razran, 1940). In-
deed, it is only within the past 25 years that empirical inves-
tigations of the interplay between affect and cognition have
been published with regularity in mainstream psychology
journals (see LeDoux, 1996).
Psychology’s late start in exploring the affect-cognition
interface reflects the fact that neither behaviorism nor
cognitivism—the two paradigms that dominated the disci-
pline throughout the twentieth century—ascribed much im-
portance to affective phenomena, whether in the form of
specific, short-lived emotional reactions or more nebulous,
long-lasting mood states (for detailed discussion of affect-
related concepts, see Russell & Feldman Barrett, 1999;
Russell & Lemay, 2000).
From the perspective of the radical behaviorist, all unob-
servable mental events, including those affective in nature,
were by definition deemed beyond the bounds of scientific
psychology. Although early behaviorist research examined
the environmental conditioning of emotional responses (an
issue taken up later in this chapter), later studies focused
mainly on the behavioral consequences of readily manipu-
lated drive states, such as thirst or fear. In such studies, emo-
tion was instilled in animals through crude if effective means,
such as electric shock, and so-called emotionality was opera-
tionalized by counting the number of faecal boli deposited by
small, scared animals. As a result, behaviorist research and
theory added little to our understanding of the interrelations
between affect and cognition.
Until recently, the alternative cognitive paradigm also
had little interest in affective phenomena. To the extent that
the cognitive revolutionaries of the early 1960s considered
affects at all, they typically envisaged them as disruptive
influences on proper—read emotionless orcold—thought
processes. Thus, the transition from behaviorism to cogni-
tivism allowed psychology to reclaim its head, but did noth-
ing to recapture its heart.
Things are different today. Affect is now known to play
a critical role in how information about the world is
processed and represented. Moreover, affect underlies the
cognitive representation of social experience (Forgas, 1979),
and emotional responses can serve as an organizing princi-
ple in cognitive categorization (Niedenthal & Halberstadt,
2000). Thus, the experience of affect—how we feel about
people, places, and events—plays a pivotal role in people’s
cognitive representations of themselves and the world
around them.
Affect also has a more dynamic role in information pro-
cessing. In a classic series of studies, Razran (1940) showed
that subjects evaluated sociopolitical messages more favorably
when in a good than in a bad mood. Far ahead of their time,
Razran’s studies, and those reported by other investigators
(e.g., Bousfield, 1950), provided the first empirical evidence of
mood congruence, and their results were initially explained in
terms of either psychodynamic or associationist principles.Psychodynamic AccountFreud’s psychoanalytic theory suggested that affect has a
dynamic, invasive quality that can infuse thinking and judg-
ments unless adequately controlled. A pioneering study by
Feshbach and Singer (1957) tested the psychodynamic pre-
diction that attempts to suppress affect should increase the
“pressure” for affect infusion. They induced fear in their sub-
jects through electric shocks and then instructed some of them
to suppress their fear. Fearful subjects’ thoughts about another
person showed greater mood congruence, so that they per-
ceived the other person as being especially anxious. Interest-
ingly, indeed ironically (Wegner, 1994), this effect was even
greater when subjects were trying to suppress their fear.
Feshbach and Singer (1957) explained this in terms of projec-
tion and proposed that “suppression of fear facilitates the ten-
dency to project fear onto another social object” (p. 286).Conditioning AccountAlthough radical behaviorism outlawed the study of sub-
jective experiences, including affects, conditioning theories
did nevertheless have an important influence on research.
Watson’s work with Little Albert was among the first to find
affect congruence in conditioned responses (Watson, 1929;
Watson & Rayner, 1920). This work showed that reactions
toward a previously neutral stimulus, such as a furry rabbit,
could become affectively loaded after an association had been
established between the rabbit and fear-arousing stimuli, such
as a loud noise. Watson thought that most complex affective
reactions acquired throughout life are established as a result of
just such cumulative patterns of incidental associations.
The conditioning approach was subsequently used by
Byrne and Clore (1970; Clore & Byrne, 1974) to explore
affective influences on interpersonal attitudes. These re-
searchers argued that aversive environments (as uncondi-
tioned stimuli) spontaneously produce negative affective
reactions (as unconditioned responses). When another per-
son is encountered in an aversive environment (the condi-
tioned stimulus), the affective reaction it evokes will become