Mood-dependent Memory: Trends in Cognitive Sciences - Lewis - Article

The mood of a person influences which aspects of the environment stand out and what people will encode, but also what people remember about the past. When your mood matches the emotional content of a memory (mood congruence) people are better at remembering this emotional material. Also, you can more easily remember a memory when you are in the same mood as when the memory took place (mood dependence).

What do mood and memory have to do with each other?

The amount of activity that is associated with the emotional context during the time of encoding correlates with the probability of correct recall. If the encoding context was positive, activity showed up in the right fusiform gyrus (which is associated with reward). If the context was negative, activity showed up in the right amygdala (usually associated with negative emotion). These results suggest a neural basis for the influence of mood at encoding on later recall and an association with specific regions in the brain.

What is the relation between the semantic-network approach and mood-dependent memory?

Mood congruence and dependency can be related to the semantic network approach. According to this approach, there are emotion-specific memory nodes which connect aspects of an emotion that are related to an emotion. This may trigger the next node, and therefore the rest of the associated network. This model explains mood congruency because mood-related activity at retrieval can awaken the nodes, thereby coming closer to the critical threshold for retrieval of this memory. Mood dependency can be explained when mood at encoding may become associated with the otherwise neutral stored information. In both cases, activity of the network at the moment of retrieval could lead to facilitation of retrieving this memory.

What are topics for further research?

The idea that mood at retrieval influences the emotional system is partly supported. However, the assumption that recall of information with a specific valence or while in a specific mood leads to activity in the emotional system which corresponds to that mood, is not largely supported by evidence. Since it’s unclear that the emotional system has different outcomes for positive and negative encodings (like the researchers would expect) and also it is not clear how the emotional system related to mood is interacting with the activity at recall (and thus facilitating this process) the support for the assumptions of the semantic-network approach is very weak. Further research needs to elaborate on this possibility.