title: Mood-congruent memory in daily life: evidence from interactive ambulatory monitoring.
abstract: Evidence from the psychological laboratory indicates that emotional states tend to facilitate the encoding and retrieval of stimuli of the same emotional valence. To explore mood-congruent memory and the role of arousal in daily life, we applied a new interactive ambulatory technique. Psychophysiological arousal as indexed by non-metabolic heart rate, self-reported emotions and situational information were assessed during 24-h recordings in 70 healthy participants. The emotional state was used to trigger word list presentations on a minicomputer. Our results show that psychophysiological arousal at the time of encoding enhanced the recall of negative words in negative emotional conditions, whereas low psychophysiological arousal facilitated recall of positive words. In positive contexts, mood congruency was more prominent when arousal was low. These results demonstrate how automated experimentation with an ambulatory technique may help to assess emotional memory in real-world contexts, thus providing new methods for diverse fields of application.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Biological and Differential Psychology Section, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany.
authors.forename: Simone N
authors.initials: SN
authors.lastname: Loeffler
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Myrtek
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Peper
mesh_terms: D000203:Activities of Daily Living; D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition; D004562:Electrocardiography; D005260:Female; D006339:Heart Rate / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D006854:Hydrocortisone; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D008875:Middle Aged; D018670:Monitoring, Ambulatory / Q000379:methods*; D009043:Motor Activity; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D057566:Self Report; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D055815:Young Adult
chemical_list: D006854:Hydrocortisone