How Mood Has an Effect on How we Retrieve Past Memories
The study
Maccallum et al. (1999) looks at the impact of hypnotically induced mood on the retrieval of specific autobiographical memories. The subjects were undergraduate students from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Pretested for no clinical depression, 24 subjects (15 females and 9 males) were found to be highly hypnotizable, and 21 participants (12 females and 9 males) lowly hypnotizable. Using the experimental design, for the independent variable, subjects were randomly assigned to either the sad, neutral or happy induced state conditions. To induce the emotional states (sad, neutral, or happy), subjects were told they would begin to feel sad, a neutral or a happy mood state, that they would experience the mood strongly. Then they were read a short passage involving a person receiving a telephone call from their mother that their father had been killed (to induce sad mood), about performing university related tasks (to induce neutral mood), or that they won a lottery (to induce happy mood). The mood before and after mood induction were recorded by asking participants to rate their level of sadness and happiness from a scale of 1 to 100 (0 is not at all happy, 100 is extremely happy, 0 is not at all sad, 100 is extremely sad) and to count from 1 to 10 (the counting were timed and longer length is more sad). For the assessment of the dependent variable, subjects were asked to provide a specific personal memory (any single event that the subjects were directly involved in that lasted less than 1 day) within 60 seconds to each positive or negative cued words. There are five positive (gift, compliment, helpful, friendly, and smile) cued words, and five negatives (disappointed, mistake, argument, angry, and lonely).
The Findings
The results show that high hypnotizable subjects in the sad condition provided fewer specific memories in response to positive rather than negative words, in neutral condition more for positives than negatives, and in happy similar amount of specific personal memories for both negative and positive cues. There was no difference across the low hypnotizable subjects across the conditions. The main theme from this study is that emotional states specifically sadness can limit our ability to recall happy memories during hypnosis.
The Theory
The reasoning behind why it is harder for people to remember happy things when they are sad is because it takes energy. Whereas when people are already happy, they have lots of mental energy and can remember both happy and sad memories.
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First of all, I’d like to say thank you. Thank you for giving me the chance to live. Thank you for everything, everything you’ve done for us. I really am grateful to be here.I just want you to know that I will never turn my back on you. I am truly sorry that I’ve been bringing you down…
