Bower (1981) conducted a study on the effects of emotion on memory. In the study, Bower presented participants with a list of words that were either emotionally neutral or emotionally charged. The participants were then asked to recall as many of the words as they could. Bower found that participants were able to recall significantly more of the emotionally charged words compared to the neutral words.
This study has important implications for our understanding of the role of emotion in memory. It suggests that emotion can have a powerful influence on our ability to remember information. This is because emotion can serve as an attention-getting device, drawing our focus to the information and making it more likely to be encoded into memory.
Bower's study also has practical applications. For example, educators can use this research to design lesson plans that incorporate emotionally charged material in order to improve students' retention of the material. Similarly, advertisers can use this research to create more effective ads by incorporating emotional elements that are likely to stick in the minds of consumers.
Overall, Bower's study highlights the importance of emotion in memory and demonstrates the powerful influence it can have on our ability to retain and recall information. It is a valuable contribution to our understanding of how the human brain processes and stores information, and it has practical implications for a variety of fields, including education and advertising.
Bower’s Network Theory and its Link in Depression and Anxiety
Similar findings have been reported concerning the patterns of selective attention associated with elevated anxiety. Results: MD patients showed a broad impairment of emotion recognition. Sara Miller McCune founded SAGE Publishing in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community. Thus, information of a positive inclination is more likely to come to mind when we are in a happy rather than sad mood. Annual Review of Sociology, 24 1 : 239. This method includes a real time measurement of instantaneous heart rate i.
Bower, G. (1981) Mood and memory. American Psychologist, 36, 129
The purpose of the research reviewed here is to clarify these circumstances and mechanisms. Method: Thirty MD patients 15 men, 15 women and 30 healthy controls were presented with pictures of emotional facial expressions and affective scenes. Principal offices are located in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne. SAGE is a leading international provider of innovative, high-quality content publishing more than 900 journals and over 800 new books each year, spanning a wide range of subject areas. Bower 1981 suggested that mood can be represented as a node, or unit, within an associative network model of memory. These factors are a the nature of the target events or the manner in which they are encoded i.
Depression treatment should put increased focus to the association between negative mood bias and social functioning. American Psychologist, 36, 129-148. They were asked to estimate the intensity and allocation of the emotions expressed by the faces as well as the elicited emotions by the scenes. In relating mood-memory and its effect to cognitive processes in emotion, studies have helped in understanding individual differences in emotionality, and particularly differences in vulnerability to pathological emotional states. Two general types of study are therefore of special interest: those comparing groups differing on trait measures of negative emotionality and those that contrast individuals with or without emotional disorders such as depression or anxiety states.
Depression severity was negatively related to experience of happiness. Though it has sometimes been shown that events encoded in a certain state of affect or mood are most retrievable in that state, neither the circumstances under which mood dependent memory MDM occurs nor the mechanisms that enable its emergence are as yet well understood. The negativity bias was stronger in male than female patients. Within such a network, a particular mood may become linked or associated with events that occur during one's life when the mood was experienced. Anxiety and the allocation of attention to threat. In addition to these full-length articles, Psychological Science also features short summaries of new research developments.
Bower, G. H. (1981). Mood and memory. American Psychologist, 36, 129
Endorsement of dysfunctional beliefs depends on mood state. Annual Review of Psychology, 45: 26-45. Several researchers have reported that depressed mood states elicit more pronounced cognitive biases in those individuals who report a past history of depressive episodes, suggesting a high level of trait vulnerability to this emotion Miranda et al 1990. Thus, we are more likely to recall material acquired in a particular mood when we are in the same, rather than a different, mood at the time of recall. The journal publishes authoritative articles of interest across all of scientific psychology's subdisciplines, including the behavioral, clinical, cognitive, neural, and social sciences. Depending on how one thinks emotional information is represented in memory, emotional states could activate all congruent representations; that is, those consistent in valence and meaning with that emotion.
. Given these relations, when someone is in a happy mood they may be more likely to retrieve and become consciously aware of events that occurred at a previous time when the happy mood was experienced. Warmer and More Social: Recent Developments in Cognitive Social Psychology. To this end, the research focuses on four factors that appear to play pivotal roles in the occurrence of MDM. In Emotion and Social Judgments, ed. Exploring these four factors in detail may make it possible to resolve much of the controversy that now surrounds MDM, and to acquire fresh insights into its cognitive and affective foundations.
Bower 1981 suggested that the approach to the development of this theory is considering humans as biological machines endowed with a cognitive system for acquiring and using knowledge , and to ask what role motives and emotions should play in such a system. We identified three psychological states happiness, excitement, and vigor whose strength can be predicted from the strength of heart rate response. Second, any given material is more likely to be retrieved when its affective tone matches the individual's mood at the time of recall mood-congruent memory. American Psychologist, 36, 129-148. Bower's 1981, 1991 influential network theory assumed that mood states automatically activate all associated representations in memory. In contrast, low trait anxious subjects responded to the state anxiety elevation by showing a marginally significant effect in the opposite direction.
Conclusions: Our findings show accordance with the mood-congruency hypothesis. Alternatively, only some kinds of congruent information might be activated, such as that involved in causing the emotion or relating to the individual's current concerns. However, a reversal of this effect should also be plausible: taking a particular event associated with a mood. High trait anxious students responded to elevated state anxiety by displaying increased allocation of visual attention toward emotionally threatening examination-related stimulus words. American Psychologist, 36, 129—148. Cognitive Approaches to Emotion and Emotional Disorders.
Article citations Bower, G. A growing selection of library products includes archives, data, case studies and video. Article citations Bower, G. We recorded the instantaneous heart rates of 10 subjects total of 27 cases while they watched Japanese professional baseball games at a stadium and had them subjectively rate the degree of their psychological states in an after-event interview. Mood congruity of social judgments. Bower 1981 referred to this as mood-state dependent memory.
