70 Mood, Cognition, and Memory
an affirmative answer: As positive mood primes more posi-
tive and optimistic inferences about interpersonal situations,
self-disclosure intimacy may also be higher when people feel
good.
In a series of recent studies (Forgas, 2001), subjects first
watched a videotape that was intended to put them into either
a happy or a sad mood. Next, subjects were asked to ex-
change e-mails with an individual who was in a nearby room,
with a view to getting to know the correspondent and forming
an overall impression of him or her. In reality, the correspon-
dent was a computer that had been preprogrammed to gener-
ate messages that conveyed consistently high or low levels of
self-disclosure.
As one might expect, the subjects’ overall impression of
the purported correspondent was higher if they were in a
happy than in a sad mood. More interestingly, the extent to
which the subjects related their own interests, aspirations, and
other personal matters to the correspondent was markedly af-
fected by their current mood. Happy subjects disclosed more
than did sad subjects, but only if the correspondent recipro-
cated with a high degree of disclosure. These results suggest
that mood congruence is likely to occur in many unscripted
and unpredictable social encounters, where people need to
rely on constructive processing to guide their interpersonal
strategies.
Synopsis
Evidence from many sources suggests that people tend to
perceive themselves, and the world around them, in a manner
that is congruent with their current mood. Over the past
25 years, explanations of mood congruence have gradually
evolved from earlier psychodynamic and conditioning ap-
proaches to more recent cognitive accounts, such as the con-
cept of affect priming, which Bower (1981; Bower & Cohen,
1982) first formalized in his well-known network theory of
emotion.
With accumulating empirical evidence, however, it has
also become clear that although mood congruence is a robust
and reliable phenomenon, it is not universal. In fact, in many
circumstances mood either has no effect or even has an in-
congruent effect on cognition. How are such divergent results
to be understood?
The affect infusion model offers an answer. As discussed
earlier, the model implies, and the literature indicates, that
mood congruence is unlikely to occur whenever a cogni-
tive task can be performed via a simple, well-rehearsed di-
rect access strategy or a highly motivated strategy. In these
conditions there is little need or opportunity for cognition
to be influenced or infused by affect. Although the odds of
demonstrating mood congruence are improved when subjects
engage in heuristic processing of the kind identified with the
AAI model, such processing is appropriate only under special
circumstances (e.g., when the subjects’ cognitive resources
are limited and there are no situational or motivational pres-
sures for more detailed analysis).
According to the AIM, it is more common for mood con-
gruence to occur when individuals engage in substantive,
constructive processing to integrate the available information
with preexisting and affectively primed knowledge struc-
tures. Consistent with this claim, the research reviewed here
shows that mood-congruent effects are magnified when peo-
ple engage in constructive processing to compute judgments
about peripheral rather than central conceptions of the self,
atypical rather than typical characters, and complex rather
than simple personal conflicts. As we will see in the next sec-
tion, the concept of affect infusion in general, and the idea of
constructive processing in particular, may be keys to under-
standing not only mood congruence, but mood dependence as
well.MOOD DEPENDENCEOur purpose in this second half of the chapter is to pursue the
problem of mood-dependent memory (MDM) from two
points of view. Before delineating these perspectives, we
should begin by describing what MDM means and why it is a
problem.
Conceptually, mood dependence refers to the idea that
what has been learned in a certain state of affect or mood is
most expressible in that state. Empirically, MDM is often in-
vestigated within the context of a two-by-two design, where
one factor is the mood—typically either happy or sad—in
which a person encodes a collection of to-be-remembered or
target events, and the other factor is the mood—again, happy
versus sad—in which retention of the targets is tested. If
these two factors are found to interact, such that more events
are remembered when encoding and retrieval moods match
than when they mismatch, then mood dependence is said to
occur.
Why is MDM gingerly introduced here as “the problem”?
The answer is implied by two quotations from Gordon
Bower, foremost figure in the area. In an oft-cited review
of the mood and memory literature, Bower (1981) remarked
that mood dependence “is a genuine phenomenon whether
the mood swings are created experimentally or by endoge-
nous factors in a clinical population” (p. 134). Yet just eight