Current negative mood encourages changes in end-of-life treatment decisions and is associated with false memories

Abstract

To investigate the effects of mood on people's end-of-life treatment decisions and their false memories of those decisions, participants took part in two sessions. At Time 1, participants were experimentally induced into positive or negative moods. They decided whether they would want to receive or refuse treatments in a range of hypothetical medical scenarios, such as tube feeding while in a coma. Four weeks later, at Time 2, participants were induced into the same or the opposite mood and made these decisions a second time. They also recalled their previous decisions. Participants in negative moods at Time 2 changed more of their current decisions and falsely remembered more of their previous decisions than participants in positive moods. These findings suggest that people's current moods influence whether they change their treatment decisions; current decisions in turn bias recall of past decisions

Keywords:

• Advance directives
• Mood
• Decision change
• Memory

Acknowledgements

This research was initiated following a conversation with Professor Peter Ditto. During this research Stefanie Sharman was supported by a UNSW Vice Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship; she is now at Deakin University, Melbourne.

Notes

¹At T1, 102 participants attended; 79 reached the mood criterion (77.5% overall; 82.4% pleasant mood, 72.5% unpleasant mood). At T2, 73 participants returned (92.4%); 57 reached the mood criterion (78.1% overall; 75.7% pleasant mood, 86.1% unpleasant mood).

²There was no difference in delay across conditions, Fs<.51, ps>.48.

³Degrees of freedom were corrected when the assumption of equal variances was not met.

⁴Analyses using participants’ 1–5 ratings revealed the same pattern of results.