Influence of affect on everyday memory: Self-reference of retrieval cue

Abstract

There have been two views as to mood congruent recall: The one interprets it as an automatic process, while the other explains that it appears only when self-referent information processing is running. In this study, one experiment was conducted in order to examine these two opposing views. By false feedback of task performance, positive or negative mood had been induced in each subject, who was given two “cue” words, and asked to retrieve everyday events, The result was that mood congruent recall occurred when the word “self” was presented as a cue; but no effect of mood with neutral cues. This result supports the hypothesis that mood congruent recall is found only when self-referent information is processed. However, such effect was not evident in positive mood condition. In positive mood condition, there remains a possibility that mood congruent recall may be an automatic process. The effects of mood on memory were discussed from various viewpoints. © 1992, The Japanese Psychological Association. All rights reserved.