The mood-congruity hypothesis: an examination of encoding mood, gender, and appraisal latency.

Abstract

Bower (1981) modified the associative network theory of memory (Collins & Quillian, 1968) to include emotions as specific nodes or memory units ssociatively linked with autonomic, behavioral, and semantic information stored in long-term memory. A prediction derived from this modification is the mood-congruity hypothesis, which proposes that stimulus material which is affect congruent to an individual's current mood state would be perceived faster and recalled better than material affect incongruent. Gerrig and Bower (1982, p. 197) indicate "emotional arousal should prime or activate perceptual categories and words related to that (current) emotion." Priming a mood state, therefore, would yield faster latencies for recognizing mood congruent stimuli. The mood congruity hypothesis for recall has been demonstrated by several researchers (e.g. Bower, Gilligan, & Monteiro, 1981; Weaver, McNeill, Van Dillen, & Arganbright, 1988a). However, support for the mood congruity hypothesis for faster perception is mixed. Further, Clark and Teasdale (1985) indicated women recalled more material congruent to their mood state than men. Bower, Monteiro, and Gilligan (1978), however, reported an increased mood-congruity recall effect for men. In the present study, 48 undergraduate volunteers experienced an induced happy or sad mood state and then appraised 36 happy, sad, and neutral stimulus sentences as being happy or sad or as describing events that are common or uncommon. Gender, mood, and appraisal were the between-subjects independent variables, with sentence affect being the within-subjects independent variable. The dependent variable was the latency to appraise the stimulus sentences in seconds. Mood induction was successful. The analysis of variance for the latency scores revealed significance for the appraisal and sentence affect main effects, and the appraisal x sentence affect interaction. Happy and sad subjects appraised happy and sad sentences faster when making happy/sad relative to common/uncommon sentence appraisals. The lack of a mood x sentence appraisal interaction did not support the mood congruity hypothesis. A reevaluation of Bower's (1981) modification of the associative network theory of memory seems warranted. This conclusion is elaborated in the discussion section.