Ways Your Mood Can Affect Your Own Memory

Running head: DOES MOOD AFFECT MEMORY 1

Understanding Ways Your Mood Can Affect You Own Memory
Amanda Cavallaro
Umass Boston

Authors Note Amanda Cavallaro, Student in Psychology, Umass Boston

DOES MOOD AFFECT MEMORY 2
Abstract
This paper will examine the relationship between mood and memory. It will leave you with understanding explanations reasons why our mood can affect our memory. Participants will be asked to watch a couple short movie clips and then respond to them by using a rating scale. The type of study is an experimental within- subjects design because participants can be tested more than once. The movie clips shown will either be happy or sad. Following the movie clips, they will then be shown 24 words on a slide. These 24 words will be similar different and then two random ones and all words around the same letter length. After seeing all slides, the participants will be asked to write down as many words as they can remember.. This research suggests that your current mood indeed does affect your memory. After the study is completed the research raises three questions. First did more participants remember more happy or sad words, and were the words they remembered more positive or negative. This study should be done by everyone to see how your mood can impact your own memory. Keywords: mood, memory, mood induction, mood congruent recall, mood incongruent recall

Introduction The topic being discussed with participants for this study is can your mood affect memory in any way. The experiment will test if their mood will be affected after watching two short video clips, one sad and the other happy. After that, they participants will be asked to remember as many words as possible from a series of slides shown. Research in previous studies has displayed that an emotion will serve as the memory that can be related to certain events or the arousal of the emotion will be seen during the study. My hypothesis states that your mood does affect your memory, causing one to not retain information.

DOES MOOD AFFECT MEMORY 3

Discussion The question to emphasis here is does your mood affect your memory. Based on my hypothesis, it stated that you mood does affect your memory. However, when looking at the results in the previous section, we did not find anything that was significantly higher or lower when looking at all the words that were given in the slides. This shows that your current mood doesn't affect your memory. The tests that looked at all the positive and negative numbers showed that they were all even, therefore supporting the null hypothesis. This can be related to my introduction of the words used because I though that your current mood would affect your memory, however after looking at the results given that is not the case. For future research, one could experiment again by asking more participants to participate in the study or distinguishing between male and female because mood can vary. It would also be interesting to see if you would get the same results if the study performed a different design.

Method For this study there was a total of twenty - five participants. There were 18 females and 7 males; all participants are from Northeastern University. Participants are required to watch a sad video clip that comes from the movie “My girl”. Here is a brief summary for “ My girl”; Next they will be asked to write on the paper given by an instructor how they feel on a scale of zero to seven - zero being very sad all the way to seven being very happy. After completing this, participants will then be asked to remember

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