Are real moods required to reveal mood-congruent and mood-dependent memory?

While simulating, or acting as if, they were either happy or sad, universit y students recounted emotionally positive, neutral, or negative events from their personal past. Two days later, subjects were asked freely recall the gist of all of these events, and they did so while simulating a mood that either did or did not match the one they had feigned before. By comparing t he present results with those of a previous study, in which affectively rea listic and subjectively convincing states of happiness and sadness had been engendered experimentally, we searched for-and found-striking differences between simulating and actual moods in their impact on autobiographical mem ory. In particular, it appears that the impact on autographical memory. In particular, it appears that the mood-congruent effects elicited by simulati ng moods are qualitatively different from those evoked by induced moods, an d that only authentic affects have the power to produce mood-dependent effe cts.