Mood Congruence.

- Mood congruence is the consistency of a person’s emotional state with their responds to the
situation that they experienced at that certain time. (Vice versa: Mood incongruence)
- Gordon Bower’s Associative Network Theory of Feeling Effects:
o emotions are connected to many different words that represent the given emotion
and represent different meanings for different individuals
o the word 'dog' can trigger different emotional nodes that represent different word
strings and meaningful associations based on different and individual experiences
o participants representing positive mood states recalled more positively connoted
words, and those who represented the negatively affected group recalled more
negatively connoted words
- Theory of Emotional Valence:
o nature (positive or negative) of the emotion at encoding is congruent with the
nature of the emotion in which the memory is to be recalled
- Paula Niedenthal’s Theory of Categorical Conception:
o individual's current affective state determines what they pay attention to
o attention can be implicitly or explicitly encoded
o if an individual is sad, they will pay more attention to the aspects of their
environment that are congruent with sadness
- Mood Congruency is strongest when people try to recall personally meaningful episodes,
because such events were most likely to be colored by their moods