AFFECT AND IMPRESSION-FORMATION - INFLUENCE OF MOOD ON PERSON MEMORY

Two experiments were conducted to examine the effects of mood on person memory. Subjects in a happy, sad, or neutral mood read impression congruent, incongruent, and irrelevant behavioral information about a target person and were later asked to recall as many of the behaviors as they could. In both experiments, only Ss in a neutral mood recalled impression-incongruent information at a higher probability than congruent information, replicating previous person memory research. However, neither happy nor sad subjects showed a recall advantage for incongruent information. These results suggest that induced affect apparently disrupted the type of elaborative processing necessary to produce the incongruency effect. (C) 1995 Academic Press,Inc.