How Our Mood Affects What We Remember
Fact: When we are sad, we are more likely to remember and think about sad things. When we are happy, we can remember both happy and sad times.
The study
Maccallum et al. (1999) looks at the impact of hypnotically induced mood on the retrieval of specific autobiographical memories. The subjects were undergraduate students from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Pretested for no clinical depression, 24 subjects (15 females and 9 males) were found to be highly hypnotizable, and 21 participants (12 females and 9 males) lowly hypnotizable. Using the experimental design, for the independent variable, subjects were randomly assigned to either the sad, neutral or happy induced state conditions. To induce the emotional states (sad, neutral, or happy), subjects were told they would begin to feel sad, a neutral or a happy mood state, that they
