Mood state and recall biases (original) (raw)
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Cognitive Therapy and Research, 1989
Zajonc H980, 1984b) has argued that affect has many properties not shared by cognition and that affect is the product of a separate, partially independent system. His position has been understood as implying that cognitive therapy is essentially misguided in attempting to modify emotional disorders. In the present article we justify the approach taken by cognitive therapy by making distinctions among different types of cognition and demonstrating that certain of these types have precisely those properties that Zajonc claimed to be unique to affect. Cognition that is unconscious and automatic can, for example, be effortless and uncontrollable, be influenced by drugs and hormones, be irrevocable by deliberate thought, and so forth. It thus seems possible that such types of cognition can be part of affective responses and can play a role in producing these "emotional" qualities. Therefore, a secure theoretical basis exists for using cognitive therapy to treat affective disorders. Examining several recent advances in understanding and treating pathological affects supports this analysis, revealing that each succeeds by differentiating types of cognition and their role in emotion.
On the interdependence of cognition and emotion
Cognition & Emotion, 2007
Affect and cognition have long been treated as independent entities, but in the current review we suggest that affect and cognition are in fact highly interdependent. We open the article by discussing three classic views for the independence of affect. These are (i) the affective independence hypothesis, that emotion is processed independently from cognition, (ii) the affective primacy hypothesis, that evaluative processing precedes semantic processing, and (iii) the affective automaticity hypothesis, that affectively potent stimuli commandeer attention and evaluation is automatic. We argue that affect is not independent from cognition, that affect is not primary to cognition, nor is affect automatically elicited. The second half of the paper discusses several instances of how affect influences cognition. We review experiments showing affective involvement in perception, semantic activation, and attitude activation. We conclude that one function of affect is to regulate cognitive processing.
American Psychologist, 1981
This article describes experiments in which happy or sad moods were induced in subjects by hypnotic suggestion to investigate the influence of emotions on memory and thinking. One result was that subjects exhibited mood-state-dependent memory in recall of word lists, personal experiences recorded in a daily diary, and childhood experiences; people recalled a greater percentage of those experiences that were affectively congruent with the mood they were in during recall. Second, emotion powerfully influenced such cognitive processes as free associations, imaginative fantasies, social perceptions, and snap judgments about others' personalities (e.g., angry subjects generated angry associates, told hostile stories, and were prone to find fault with others). Third, when the feeling-tone of a narrative agreed with the reader's emotion, the salience and memorability of events in that narrative were increased. Thus, sad readers attended more to sad material, identified with a sad character from a story, and recalled more about that character. An associative network theory is proposed to account for these several results. In this theory, an emotion serves as a memory unit that can enter into associations with coincident events. Activation of this emotion unit aids retrieval of events associated with it; it also primes emotional themata for use in free association, fantasies, and perceptual categorization.
Mood and memory: Mood-congruity effects in absence of mood
Memory & Cognition, 1988
The mood-congruity effect refers to facilitated processing of information when the affective valence of this information is congruent with the subject's mood. In this paper we argue that mood may be a sufficient but not a necessary condition to produce the mood-congruity effect of selective learning. Two experiments are presented in which subjects learned lists of words with neutral, positive, and negative affective valences. In the learning task the subjects were instructed to behave as if they were depressed or happy. The mood-congruity effect was indeed obtained. The effect was stronger with subjects who "predicted" the relationship between mood and affective word valence than with subjects who were unaware of this relationship. The results are not simply attributed to task demands, but are interpreted in terms of a model of cognitive processes and people's knowledge about mood states.
Clinical Psychology Review, 1990
Increasing interest in the relation between emotion and cognition has led to the development of a range of laboratory methods for inducing temporary mood states. Sixteen such techniques are reviewed and compared on a range of factors including success rate, the possibility of demand effects, the intensity of the induced mood, and the range of different moods that can be induced. Three diff erent cognitive models (self-schema theory, semantic network theory, and fragmentation theory) which have been successfully used to describe long-term mood states, such as clinical depression, are elaborated to describe the process of temporary mood induction. Finally, the use of mood induction is contrasted with alternative m.ethods (such as the study of patients suffering from depession) for investigating emotion. The author is grateful to David M. Clark and Kathy Clayden for helpful comments and to the Medical Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust for their financial support.
Selectivity of learning caused by affective states
Journal of Experimental …, 1981
We investigated how emotional states influence learning and memory. Specifically, we asked whether people's remembering of a text varies with their emotional mood at the time they read or recall a text, A theoretical framework is proposed that represents an emotion as a unit within a semantic network that encodes memories. It also assumes that by spreading activation, a dominant emotion will enhance the availability of emotion-congruent interpretations and the salience of congruent stimulus materials for learning. To collect relevant observations, powerful moods were induced by posthypnotic suggestions. Experiment 1 found that happy or sad readers identified with, and recalled more facts about, a character who is in the same mood as they are. In Experiment 2, this selective recall by character could not be produced by inducing the mood at recall after subjects had read the story in a neutral mood. In Experiment 3, subjects read a text wherein one character described many unrelated happy and sad incidents from his life. Readers were made to feel happy or sad while reading and, independently, while recalling this text. Mood during reading caused selective learning of mood-congruent incidents, but mood during recall had little effect. Experiment 4 replicated with this one-character narrative the finding that inducing the mood during recall only produced no selective recall of its happy versus sad incidents. Experiment 5 pitted the happy-sad nature of the incidents against the mood of the character narrating them. Readers learned more mood-congruent than mood-incongruent incidents, but did not learn more about the mood-congruent character. Thus, rather than identifying exclusively with the same-mood character, subjects selectively learned whatever affective material was congruent with their emotional state. The mood-congruity effect is consistent with the network theory of emotion and memory. Several more specific hypotheses were proposed. One is that mood-congruent material is more memorable because it elevates the intensity of the subject's feelings, whereas mood-incongruent material diminishes mood intensity. A second is that subjects focus on moodcongruent material in order to explain and justify their hypnotically instructed emotion. But further results did not support this attribution hypothesis. A third hypothesis is that mood-congruent material may be more likely to remind the reader of a similar experience, and this promotes learning.
How emotions inform judgment and regulate thought
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2007
Being happy or sad influences the content and style of thought. One explanation is that affect serves as information about the value of whatever comes to mind. Thus, when a person makes evaluative judgments or engages in a task, positive affect can enhance evaluations and empower potential responses. Rather than affect itself, the information conveyed by affect is crucial. Tests of the hypothesis find that affective influences can be made to disappear by changing the source to which the affect is attributed. In tasks, positive affect validates and negative affect invalidates accessible cognitions, leading to relational processing and item-specific processing, respectively. Positive affect is found to promote, and negative affect to inhibit, many textbook phenomena from cognitive psychology.