Affect and accessibility

Abstract Depressed patients experience thoughts with predominantly negative content. This could be because depressed mood increases the accessibility, or availability, of negative memories relative to that of positive memories. Investigations of the effects of experimentally induced and naturally occurring variations in mood on the recall of memories of personal experiences found results consistent with this suggestion; in depressed mood the latency of retrieval of positive memories was increased, the probability of retrieval of positive memories was decreased, and the probability of retrieval of negative memories was increased. The recall of certain positive and negative words was also found to be differentially affected by mood at recall. It is hypothesized that the effects of current mood on accessibility depend on the extent to which the events to which memories relate have previously been associated with different moods. Differences in the effects of mood on accessibility consistent with this suggestion have been obtained.