The false recognition of mood-matched and mood-opposite words in a memory task: introduction of a delayed testing...

This report details the results of an extended replication with 74 new subjects of Whissell, Marshall, and Whissell's 1990 study. In confirmation of the original study and two follow-up studies, subjects tended to recognize words falsely as having belonged to a list if these words matched the emotional mood of the list but not if they had an opposite mood (mood was defined in terms of the pleasantness and activity dimensions of emotion). For delayed testing (one week), this effect was even more pronounced as false recognitions for mood-matching words become as frequent as correct recognitions for words actually on the list.