Is mood congruency an effect of genuine memory or response bias?

Mood-congruent memory (i.e., enhanced memory for stimuli that match an indi vidual's emotional state) can be explained as a genuine memory effect or as a heuristic response tendency (i.e., willingness to report memories that m atch one's current mood). The signal-detection framework was used to distin guish between these two interpretations, For this purpose, a mood-sensitive recognition test had to be developed in which initially masked test items appear gradually. Such degraded presentation invites knowledge-based, const ructive inferences that are known to facilitate mood effects which are norm ally confined to recall measures. Two experiments demonstrate mood congruen cy in recognition. Signal-detection indices and response time analyses reve al that the influence of mood cannot be reduced to a heuristic response bia s but reflects increased sensitivity for mood-congruent information. This f inding is neither qualified by a speed-accuracy trade-off nor by the availa bility of semantic retrieval cues during recognition. (C) 2001 Academic Pre ss.