The influence of mood on the process and content of encoding future intentions

Abstract

Remembering to perform an intention in the future when some environmental cue is encountered is referred to as event-based prospective memory. The influence of mood on this future-oriented memory is unclear. By experimentally manipulating mood, the current set of experiments sought to examine the influence that differing mood states have on encoding future intentions. Participants were induced into a neutral, positive, or negative mood state at intention formation and returned to their baseline mood before beginning the prospective memory task. Relative to the neutral mood, positive mood facilitated and negative mood impaired intention encoding when neutrally toned cues were used, as evidenced by the proportion of cues subsequently detected. The use of negatively toned cues ameliorated the benefit of the positive mood but not the impairment of the negative mood. Further, reinstatement of the encoding mood during retrieval equated performance for all three mood conditions. Results suggest that encoded mood influences the future accessibility and completion of intended behaviours, perhaps through modulation of associative processing. The current study demonstrates that mood plays a determining role in encoding future intentions.

Keywords:

• Prospective memory
• Affect
• Future intentions
• Valence
• Emotion processing

We thank Benjamin Peck and Dusty McHenry for their dedicated assistance in data collection.

This research was supported by the John and Mary Franklin Foundation through a fellowship awarded to Justin B. Knight.

Notes

¹By mood, affective state, or emotional state we simply mean a diffuse state probably resulting from cognitive and neurophysiological responses. That is, we are referring to consciously accessible feelings that vary in their relative goodness or badness and that are probably a blend of hedonic tone and activation (Russell, 2003). In this initial examination of manipulated mood and prospective memory encoding, we are taking a broad approach and comparing effects of moods that vary in their relative positivity or negativity (e.g., Huntsinger, Clore, & Yoav Bar-Anan, 2010).

²It is currently debated whether mood states are specifically linked to a given processing style or whether mood states confer (positive or negative) value on the currently most accessible information-processing tendencies (Clore & Huntsinger, 2007, 2009). The second proposal suggests that positive mood may provide a “yes” signal, and negative mood may provide a “no” signal to the dominant, accessible processing tendencies for a given task (e.g., Huntsinger, Clore, & Bar-Anan, 2010). Thus, positive (negative) mood would promote (inhibit) the typical processing style. Given that relational or associative processing is typical for prospective memory encoding, the two proposals would make identical predictions for the influence of mood on forming intentions in the current task.

³Though some may contend that mood inductions based on Velten statements are driven totally by demand characteristics, meta-analytic work examining an array of studies that used such statements concluded that the “Velten mood induction procedure has a genuine effect on mood that is independent of demand characteristics” (Westermann, Spies, Stahl, & Hesse, 1996, p. 577).

⁴Because the positive condition exhibited poorer recognition memory accuracy for the cues associated with the intention than did the neutral condition, we sought to examine whether this lowered recognition memory may have prevented a benefit to prospective memory performance for the positive mood induction, as was found in Experiment 1. We compared cue detection between these two conditions only for those participants that recognized 100% of the cues on the final recognition memory test. This restricted analysis revealed no differences between the positive (M = .58; SE = .09) and neutral (M = .58; SE = .07) conditions in the proportion of cues that were detected, F(1, 43) < 1. It appears safe to conclude that when negatively toned cues were associated to the intention, no benefit in encoding or subsequent prospective memory performance was observed with a positive mood induction.