| This dissertation sought to examine whether affective states influence how we learn and remember events we have experienced. Everyday experiences involve a constant interplay of perception and memory. For instance, Hunt and Einstein (1981) argue that encoding items can take two forms, item-specific and relational processing. An item-specific processing approach encodes individual items and their features, whereas a relational processing approach encodes relationships among concepts. In these situations affective cues may serve to switch between relational processing and item-specific processing. Specifically, the affect-as-information hypothesis predicts that individuals experiencing positive affective cues encode items in relation to an accessible cognition, whereas individuals experiencing negative affective cues encode items in an item-specific manner (Clore et al., 2001a). To test this hypothesis, I used a false memory task that depends on relational processing to produce false memories (Roediger, Watson, McDermott, & Gallo, 2001). For all experiments, positive and negative moods were induced prior to learning various word lists. In Experiment 1, I observed that negative moods reduced occurrence of false memories. Experiment 2 manipulated the false memory instructions, and Experiment 3 manipulated the timing of the mood induction. The results of Experiments 2 and 3 provided evidence to suggest that affective states influenced encoding processes, which led to the negative mood groups producing fewer false memories. In Experiment 4, I found direct evidence that affective states influenced processing styles (relational vs. item-specific). I suggest that positive affective states trigger relational processing, whereas negative affective states trigger item-specific processing, thus leading to differences in how information is encoded and remembered. |
