Mood-Congruent Memory Bias

Mood-congruent memory bias is the tendency for a person's current emotional state to make it easier to recall memories or information that match that same emotional tone, so that someone in a sad mood, for example, more readily recalls sad or negative memories, while someone in a happy mood more readily recalls positive ones. The psychologist Gordon Bower pioneered experimental research into how mood affects memory beginning around 1981, proposing that emotions function within memory somewhat like concepts in a network, so that a given emotional state activates related memories that share that same emotional coloring and makes them more accessible for retrieval. Mood-congruent memory is closely related to, but conceptually distinct from, state-dependent memory, in which retrieval of information generally is more effective when a person's emotional or physiological state at the moment of retrieval matches the state they were in when the memory was originally formed, regardless of whether the content of the memory itself carries any particular emotional tone; mood-congruent memory concerns a match between mood and the emotional content of what is remembered, while state-dependent memory concerns a match between mood at encoding and mood at retrieval regardless of content. The bias has practical significance in clinical psychology, since it has been proposed as one mechanism that can help sustain depressive and anxious thinking, as a person's low mood makes negative memories disproportionately easier to retrieve, which in turn can reinforce and prolong that same low mood.