INFLUENCE OF EMOTIONAL STATE ON IRRELEVANT THOUGHTS

The fan effect paradigm was used to investigate the influence of emoti onal mood state on long-term memory retrieval (Anderson, 1983). Subjec ts learned target facts embedded in unrelated sentences to a specified criterion and were then given a happy, sad, or neutral mood induction . Mean response times (RTs) and error rates were analyzed in a speeded recognition test in which subjects distinguished between the learned facts and foil facts (foil facts were constructed by recombining the s ame concepts). A follow-up lexical decision task indicated that mean R T was positively correlated with an increase in the weighted proportio n of irrelevant thoughts produced by subjects in an induced sad mood. Results suggest that irrelevant thoughts associated with the sad mood state interfered with more relevant, task-oriented, thoughts and suppo rt the notion that sad mood is related to a failure to inhibit irrelev ant information.