Abstract
Mood congruent memory refers to the phenomenon of facilitated encoding for material that is congruent with mood. This study investigates mood congruent memory using autobiographical and modified autobiographical recall tasks. Ninety participants were randomly assigned to three types of mood-induced groups (positive, negative and neutral). Moods for the positive and negative mood groups were induced by listening to music. Participants in each condition were presented with 30 pleasant and 30 unpleasant trait words at 4s intervals. In the autobiographical recall task, the participants generated episodes corresponding to the stimulus items and made recognition judgments about whether or not they had experienced such an episode. In the modified autobiographical recall task, the participants rated how difficult it was for them to generate episodes of their own that correspond to the stimulus items. Mood congruent memory was observed in the positive and negative mood groups in the autobiographical recall task. The findings also suggest that the generation/recognition process or the recognition process alone is important for mood congruent memory.
