MOOD IS A COMPONENT OF MENTAL CONTEXT - COMMENT ON EICH (1995)

E. Eich (1995) found that participants' ratings of the similarity of their feelings at input and test sessions predicted the size of the observed place dependent memory effect and that a mood manipulation affected recall more than did a place manipulation. He concluded that mood dependence is the underlying cause of place dependence (and possibly of drug-state dependent memory). This conclusion assumes that mood states are transsituationally identical and that a mood can cue all associated memories, regardless of how the mood is achieved. An alternative explanation of Eich's results, the mental context hypothesis, views mood, place, mental set, and other factors as components of one's mental context, any of which can serve to cue the representation of mental context at test. In this light, Eich's results can be interpreted as showing that mood is a more reliable determinant than place of one's mental context.