Abstract
Themood-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.
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Part of this research was supported by Grant 81.983.0.82 from the Schweizerischen Nationalfonds while the authors were visitors at the Institute of Cognitive Science at the Umversity of Colorado, Boulder The advice and support recetved there ts gratefully acknowledged.
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Perrig, W.J., Perrig, P. Mood and memory: Mood-congruity effects in absence of mood. Mem Cogn 16, 102–109 (1988). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213477
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03213477