MOOD-CONGRUENCY IN RECALL - THE POTENTIAL EFFECT OF AROUSAL

The most stable of all mood and memory effects is mood-congruent recal l (Mayer, Gayle, Meehan, & Haarman, 1990). Nevertheless, a variety of debates surround this effect. One such debate is whether mood-congruen cy is due to demand characteristics. In the current experiment, 64 par ticipants experienced mood induction stimuli and were presented with l earning stimuli identical to the standard Mayer et al. (1990) conditio n. Unlike Mayer et al. (1990), demand characteristics were controlled by the use of hypothesis-naive experimenters and limited debriefing to minimize the seepage of the experimental hypothesis into the targeted participant pool. Mood-congruent recall was not observed at a statist ically significant level in this experiment. The most interesting find ing was evidence which indicated that the mood inductions altered both degrees of pleasure and arousal. This finding suggests that the two d imensions have been confounded in previous research. These results, on ce again, bring into question the validity of the ''mood-congruency'' effect.