Mood Dependent Memory for Self-generated Words Using a Musical Mood Induction Procedure

The present study investigated Mood Dependent Memory for selfgenerated words using a Musical mood induction procedure. 75 participants (25 males, 50 females) took part in this study. Testing took place over two sessions, two days apart. During the first session participants were induced into a positive or negative mood before generating a list of 16 words in a word-association task. Two days later participants were induced into either a congruent or incongruent mood and were given five minutes to freely recall the words. It was predicted that in the presence of strong, stable moods, participants whose moods at both sessions (encoding and retrieval) were congruent would remember more words than participants whose moods were incongruent. Subsequent analyses of data did not support the MDM hypothesis. However, stronger mood at encoding predicted a higher rate of recall, and greater discrepancy between encoding and retrieval moods predicted a lower rate of recall, providing moderate support for the associative network theory. It is inferred that in accordance with the associative network theory, strong, stable moods produce a greater mood dependent effect. In addition, as mood declined significantly after the free recall task it is suggested that future research should focus on alternative recall tasks to improve mood stability.