PDF (PhD Thesis Susan Chipchase) - Nottingham eTheses ...

alternatives (Lockhart, 2000). The consideration of bias is particularly
important when investigating the influence of emotion on memory as emotions
of different types have been found to have different effects on recognition bias.
Phaf & Rotteveel (2005) found that induced positive affect led to a more liberal
recognition criterion for test words, and that negative affect led to more
cautious tendencies without any effect on accuracy of recognition memory.
Levine & Bluck (2004) found similar results with memory for a real world
event in that participants who were happy about the event having occurred had
a lower threshold for judging events as having occurred than participants who
had a negative reaction to the original event. Bless et al. (1996) found that
participants who had a happy mood induced were more likely to ‘recognise’
information that was consistent with their general knowledge about eating in a
restaurant, whereas people with a sad mood induced tended to be more
conservative and accurate in their judgements. Bless et al. (1996) also found
that happy participants outperformed sad ones when performing a secondary
task whilst listening to a story on which their memory was later tested, and
took this to suggest that happy moods do not decrease cognitive capacity or
processing motivation in general, because if this were the case an impaired
secondary-task performance would be expected. In contrast, Forgas (1998)
found that positive mood reduced and negative mood improved memory
performance. Although different information processing strategies have been
shown with positive and negative moods these are not always related to the
objective accuracy of accounts and it appears that people may believe they
remember happy events more clearly than they do (Levine & Bluck, 2004).
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