Mood congruence

Mood congruence is a type of recall biased mood congruent memory, not to be mistaken with mood-dependent memory, where an individual's current mood or affective state determines the affective association of the memories that are recalled. In psychology, memories are said to be mood-congruent if they are consistent with a patient's mood or mental disorder. Mental disorders regarding mood congruence are exampled as clinical depression or bi-polar disorder.

An important consideration to the difference between mood congruence and mood dependent (or state-dependent) memory is the determination that one cannot make accurate assumptions about the emotional state of a memory during the encoding process. Therefore, the memory that is recalled is not dependent on the affective state during encoding. Another important difference is that there are multiple memories that can be recalled while in particular mood states that go across contexts and cues that may or may not recall only one specific memory.

An example of this is demonstrated through a theory proposed by Gordon Bower called the associative network theory of feeling effects. Bower's theory explains the multiple associations of memory congruence within the paradigm of the nodes of the semantic memory network. The associative network theory of feeling effects explains how emotions are connected to many different words that represent the given emotion and represent different meanings for different individuals. Like with semantic memory networks, the nodes that represent particular emotions are triggered by the words that invoke that emotion. For instance, the word 'dog' can trigger different emotional nodes that represent different word strings and meaningful associations based on different and individual experiences. For a person who has only had positive interactions with the word 'dog', the person would subsequently connect to the emotional nodes that represented positive meanings such as dog = pet = happiness in childhood.

Therefore, Bower's theory determined that not only are particular words linked to other words or phrases that represented similar affects, but that emotions in themselves had their own representative nodes distinct to their affective nature within the semantic memory network. The existence of distinct affective nodes thus explains how multiple positive or negative connotations can be conjured from memory when stimuli is presented that is of negative or positive valance. The significance of how positive or negative associations and their represented meanings in the semantic memory networks of individuals who experience the effects of memory congruence has been demonstrated in various word association studies in which the common methodology is to take samples of individuals that represent both positive, negative and neutral affective states and determine which words they recall most when presented with words representing both positive and negative connotations. In these studies the results more often than not represented the findings that the sample of participants representing positive mood states recalled more positively connoted words, and those who represented the negatively affected group recalled more negatively connoted words. However, an interesting portion of the studies were the groups that represented the neutral group that neither had feelings of negativity or positivity. These groups recalled more positive words than negative words.

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