Affective Influences on Cognition Mood Congruence, Mood Dependence, and Mood Effects on Processing Strategies

The interplay between feeling and thinking has been a subject of scholarly discussion and spirited debate since antiquity. The last few decades have witnessed a mounting interest in the impact of affective or mood states on learning, memory, decision making, and allied cognitive processes. Much of this interest has initially focused on two phenomena: mood-congruent cognition —the observation that a given mood promotes the processing of information that possesses a similar affective tone or valence, and mood-dependent memory —the observation that information encoded in a particular mood is most retrievable in that mood, irrespective of the information’s affective valence. More recently, and especially since the publication of the previous edition of this Handbook , numerous studies have found that positive and negative moods can also influence memory due to their effects on information processing styles or strategies. This chapter examines the