Some relations between pleasant and unpleasant mood-related events and depression.

Studied (a) the validity of 2 methods of identifying reinforcing and punishing events, (b) their interrelations and dimensional structure, and (c) their relation to depression. A total of 909 Ss who were screened with the MMPI and classified as depressed, nondepressed psychiatric, or normal control rated the frequency and the subjective enjoyability or aversiveness of 320 pleasant (the Pleasant Event Schedule Form III) and 320 unpleasant events (the Unpleasant Events Schedule Form I). Some Ss also monitored the occurrence of pleasant and unpleasant events and rated their mood on a daily basis (Depression Adjective Check List). Correlations between each event and mood were calculated and used to identify 49 pleasant and 35 unpleasant "mood-related events." The proportion of Ss for whom the events correlated with mood and the mean enjoyability and aversiveness of the items were hypothesized to be measures of reinforcing or punishing impact. As predicted, statistically significant correlations between these 2 measures were obtained. The mood-related events also discriminated more strongly between depressed and nondepressed groups than the non-mood-related events did. The intercorrelations between pleasant and unpleasant events yielded separate and orthogonal dimensions of punishment and of reinforcement. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-Monitoring, Activity Levels, and Mood in the Development and Maintenance of Depression.

The reactive effect on mood of self-monitoring pleasant and unpleasant events was assessed. Forty-five females spent 28 days monitoring in one of four conditions: (a) pleasant events, (b) unpleasant events, (c) both, and (d) no monitoring. Motor activity level (pedometer recordings) and mood were also assessed daily. Class of event monitored was not found to influence mood. Correlations between mood and both pleasant and unpleasant events were found even with activity level partialed out. Implications for self-monitoring assessment in depression therapy programs and for models of depression are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mood dependent memory for events of the personal past.

Previous research on mood dependent memory (MDM) suggests that the more one must rely on internal resources, rather than on external aids, to generate both the target events and the cues required for their retrieval, the more likely is one's memory for these events to be mood dependent. To instantiate this "do-it-yourself" principle, 3 experiments were conducted in which Ss experiencing either a pleasant or an unpleasant mood generated autobiographical events in response to neutral nouns. Subsequently, Ss were tested for event free recall while in the same or the alternative mood state. All 3 studies showed MDM, such that the likelihood of recalling an event generated 2 or 3 days ago was higher when generation and recall moods matched than when they mismatched. Prospects for future research aimed at elucidating and extending these results are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differential effects of induced mood on retrieval of pleasant and unpleasant events from episodic memory.

Examined the effect of depressed mood on the accessibility of memories of past real-life experiences of a pleasant or unpleasant nature. By means of a mood induction procedure, 30 students (mean age 19.2 yrs) were made happy on one occasion and depressed on another. The 2 mood states differed significantly on self-report, speech-rate, and recall-latency measures. Stimulus words to which Ss had to associate past pleasant or unpleasant experiences were presented in each mood condition, and latency of retrieval was measured. Time to retrieve pleasant memories, relative to time to retrieve unpleasant memories, was significantly longer when Ss were depressed than when they were happy, suggesting a differential effect of mood on the accessibility of these 2 types of memory. Results are considered in relation to state-dependent learning and activation of memories, and their implications for models and treatment of depression are discussed. It is suggested that cognitive models of depression need to be extended to include a reciprocal relation between thought content and depressed mood. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Changing reinforcing events: An approach to the treatment of depression.

The relationship between depression and reinforcement is central to therapy that changes reinforcing events, depression and reinforcement are assumed to be highly related phenomena. The main goal is to enhance the quantity and the quality of the person's reinforcement-related interaction. Procedures include the systematic assessment of depression level, pinpointing of key pleasant and unpleasant events, and the daily monitoring of pleasant and unpleasant events and mood. Tactics include a wide range of cognitive-behavioral interventions such as assertion, relaxation training, daily planning and time management training, and cognitive procedures intended to allow the person to deal more adaptively with aversive situations. A therapist manual is available. Pre-, post- and follow-up data for 3 groups of depressed individuals are presented. (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Affect and memory: Effects of pleasant and unpleasant odors on retrieval of happy and unhappy memories.

Interpretation of studies of induced mood and memory is complicated by the fact that mood induction procedures may elicit mood-related cognition in addition to mood per se. We used odors to produce positive and negative experiences with minimal cognitive involvement. College women recalled memories cued by neutral words while exposed to a pleasant odor, unpleasant odor, or no odor. Subjects then rated their memories as to how happy or unhappy the events recalled were at the time they occurred. Subjects in the pleasant odor condition produced a significantly greater percentage of happy memories than did subjects in the unpleasant odor condition. When subjects who did not find the odors at least moderately pleasant or unpleasant were removed from the analysis, more pronounced effects on memory were found. The results suggest that congruence between the general hedonic tone of current experience and that of material in long-term memory is sufficient to bias retrieval. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Characteristics associated with real and made-up events: The effects of event valence, event elaboration, and individual differences.

In three studies, participants rated both real and made-up personal events on several different characteristics. These included meta-cognitive beliefs about the perceived realness and typicality of these events, imagery ratings of visual detail, and emotional ratings of intensity and feelings. Studies 1 and 2 explored the impact of event valence (pleasant versus unpleasant) on these characteristics, whereas Study 3 focused on the effects of event elaboration involving guided imagery and journaling techniques. All three studies also included consideration of individual difference factors that might either enhance or attenuate the ratings that were obtained. Both Studies 1 and 2 found that pleasant events (be they real or made-up), were viewed as more typical, and more likely to have happened and be true, than unpleasant events. This pattern of meta-cognitive judgments provided support for a general positivity hypothesis, which proposes that most individuals orient towards and emphasize pleasant rather than unpleasant life experience and events. In contrast, the imagery-related components of these events, such as visual details, location, and time, were much less sensitive to the manipulation of event valence. Strong imagery-related effects, however, were noted when events were elaborated in the final study. Furthermore, this event elaboration manipulation also resulted in heightened meta-cognitive judgments of typicality, likelihood of the event having happened, and of being true. Finally, across all three studies, a series of correlational analyses indicated that the individual difference factors did not have any systematic effect on any of the event characteristic ratings. However, when event valence was not specifically manipulated (in Study 3), depressed individuals spontaneously provided twice as many unpleasant personal events as nondepressed individuals. These findings were then discussed in terms of source-confusion issues regarding personal memory accuracy, as well as the further extension of a recent model of autobiographical memory to incorporate event properties such as valence and elaboration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Relationship of stressful life events to social interest, locus of control, and psychological adjustment.

Extended recent research concerning effects of stressful life events. Scores of 46 male and 35 female undergraduates for amount of recent life change correlated positively with symptoms of maladjustment and external locus of control and negatively with social interest. Correlations were larger when life change scores were based only on unpleasant changes rather than on all changes, whether pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. Data also suggest that a minimum amount of stress was necessary before deleterious effects occurred on the variables under study. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Constraints on the effects of mood on memory.

In Study 1, pleasant and unpleasant personality trait words and abstract nouns were encoded in neutral mood and recalled in either induced depressed or induced happy mood, using 32 female and 32 male undergraduates assigned in equal numbers to 1 of the 4 conditions. Females recalled more pleasant than unpleasant words when in a happy mood and more unpleasant than pleasant words when in a depressed mood. Males failed to show this effect. Both sexes responded equally well to the induction procedures. There were no sex differences in pleasantness ratings of the words to be recalled. A prediction that differential effects of mood on recall would be greater for trait words than abstract nouns was not confirmed. In Study 2, everyday usage ratings by 36 Ss from Study 1 were obtained for the trait words from Study 1. Females gave higher usage ratings than males and, within the females, usage predicted the extent to which a word was preferentially recalled in a congruent mood state. Findings are discussed in relation to the associative network model of mood and memory, sex differences in depression, and cognitive vulnerability to depression. (38 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pleasant events, unpleasant events, and depression.

A review of previous research on P. M. Lewinsohn's (1974) model of depression shows that the causal link between a lack of response-contingent positive reinforcement and subsequent depression remains unsubstantiated. The present study tested this causal relationship through the use of cross-lagged panel correlation. 197 undergraduates completed a battery of measures of depression and pleasant events (including the Beck Depression Inventory and the Pleasant Events Schedule, respectively) twice, 1 mo apart. Results reveal that the null hypothesis of spuriousness could not be rejected, suggesting that the relation often found between a lack of pleasant events and depression is probably due to some unmeasured 3rd variable. Results also indicate that there was no causal relation between unpleasant events and depression. Possible 3rd-variable explanations are discussed. (38 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Life is pleasant--and memory helps to keep it that way!

People's recollections of the past are often positively biased. This bias has 2 causes. The 1st cause lies in people's perceptions of events. The authors review the results of several studies and present several new comparative analyses of these studies, all of which indicate that people perceive events in their lives to more often be pleasant than unpleasant. A 2nd cause is the fading affect bias: The affect associated with unpleasant events fades faster than the affect associated with pleasant events. The authors review the results of several studies documenting this bias and present evidence indicating that dysphoria (mild depression) disrupts such bias. Taken together, this evidence suggests that autobiographical memory represents an important exception to the theoretical claim that bad is stronger than good. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Memories of yesterday’s emotions: Does the valence of experience affect the memory-experience gap?

Intense pain is often exaggerated in retrospective evaluations, indicating a possible divergence between experience and memory. However, little is known regarding how people retrospectively evaluate experiences with both pleasant and unpleasant aspects. The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM; Kahneman. Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004b) provides a unique opportunity to examine memory-experience gaps in recollections of individual days, which elicit a wide gamut of emotions. We asked female participants (N = 810, Study 1, and N = 615, Study 2) to reconstruct episodes of the previous day using the DRM and demonstrated that memory and experience diverge for both pleasant and unpleasant emotions. When they rated their day overall in a retrospectively evaluative frame of mind, the participants recalled more unpleasant and pleasant emotions than they reported feeling during the individual episodes, with a larger gap for unpleasant emotions than for pleasant emotions. The findings suggest that separate processes are used for committing positive and negative events to memory and that, especially when unpleasant emotions are involved, prudence is favored over accuracy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Repressive coping: Distraction using pleasant thoughts and memories.

To avoid exposure to unpleasant or unwanted emotional material, some people may distract themselves by summoning up pleasant thoughts such as happy memories. Manipulation of negative affect might therefore result in heightened accessibility of pleasant thoughts and memories, contrary to hypotheses of mood-congruent recall. In Experiment 1, repressors were faster to recall happy memories after watching an unpleasant film than after watching a neutral film. Nonrepressors showed the opposite effect (i.e., mood-congruent memory). In Experiment 2, after an unpleasant film, repressors were faster to recall a happy memory than to recall a sad memory. In Experiment 3, repressors spontaneously generated pleasant thoughts after watching an unpleasant film, whereas nonrepressors did not. Thus, repressors apparently cope with exposure to negative affective material by accessing pleasant thoughts. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive defenses against emotional distress and the associative structure of repression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The 120-S minute: using analysis of work activity to prevent psychological distress among elementary school teachers

To avoid exposure to unpleasant or unwanted emotional material, some people may distract themselves by summoning up pleasant thoughts such as happy memories. Manipulation of negative affect might therefore result in heightened accessibility of pleasant thoughts and memories, contrary to hypotheses of mood-congruent recall. In Experiment 1, repressors were faster to recall happy memories after watching an unpleasant film than after watching a neutral film. Nonrepressors showed the opposite effect (i.e., mood-congruent memory). In Experiment 2, after an unpleasant film, repressors were faster to recall a happy memory than to recall a sad memory. In Experiment 3, repressors spontaneously generated pleasant thoughts after watching an unpleasant film, whereas nonrepressors did not. Thus, repressors apparently cope with exposure to negative affective material by accessing pleasant thoughts. Results are discussed in terms of cognitive defenses against emotional distress and the associative structure of repression.     

Personality, mood, and the evaluation of affective and neutral word pairs.

Four studies bridged the areas of personality–mood and mood–cognition relations by investigating the effects of Extraversion and Neuroticism on the evaluation of affectively pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral word pairs. Specifically measured were affectivity ratings, categorization according to affect, judgments of associative strength, and response latencies. A strong, consistent cognitive bias toward affective as opposed to neutral stimuli was found across participants. Although some biases were systematically related to personality and mood, effects of individual differences were present only under specific conditions. The results are discussed in terms of a personality–mood framework and its implications for cognitive functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Affect, pain, and autobiographical memory.

Twenty-five young female undergraduates were tested on two occasions: once when they were experiencing menstrual pain of at least moderate severity and once when they were pain free. On each occasion, Ss rated their current levels of pain and affect and retrieved real-life events from their personal past. At the end of the second occasion, Ss were reminded of all of the events they had retrieved on either occasion, and then rated the pleasantness of these events at the time of their original occurrence. Results revealed that the impact of pain on autobiographical memory was wholly mediated by its influence on mood. That is, pain impeded access to memories of pleasant personal experiences, whereas it promoted the retrieval of unpleasant events only if pain was accompanied by an increase in unpleasant affect. Discussion centers on the clinical and cognitive implications of the present results, and on prospects for future research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Static, dynamic, and causative bipolarity of affect.

In what sense are pleasant and unpleasant moods "bipolar?" One must differentiate three types of affective bipolarity: static bipolarity (the zero-order correlation between measures of pleasant and unpleasant affect, net of distortions due to measurement error, tends to be strongly negative), dynamic bipolarity (pleasant and unpleasant feelings generally change in opposite directions and to approximately the same extent), and causative bipolarity (the influence of pleasant and unpleasant affect on other variables is approximately equal and opposite). It is argued that static bipolarity is often attenuated by measurement error, dynamic bipolarity can be masked by asymmetrical scaling artifacts, and causative bipolarity is often obscured by both. The experience and influence of pleasant and unpleasant affect may occur along bipolar lines even if the sources of these feelings are understood as physiologically separable systems with distinct neurological loci. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depression, guilt, and self-management of pleasant and unpleasant events.

Examined the relation of 91 undergraduates' depression and guilt (the Beck Depression Inventory and the Mosher Forced-Choice Guilt Inventory, respectively) to their choice to delay unpleasant and pleasant events. Ss chose to receive punishments and gratifications immediately or 1 wk later. Depression, primarily in males, was related to a present orientation rather than a future orientation (i.e., the choice of delayed punishments over immediate punishments and of immediate small rewards over large delayed rewards). This result supports the hypothesis that depressed individuals will attempt to correct a current aversive state rather than maximize long-term gains. High guilt in males was related to the choice of immediate punishment. Results are consistent with the view that behavior choices are determined in part by anticipated internal affective consequences. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of stressful daily events on mood states: relationship to global perceived stress

This study used experience sampling methodology to examine the relationship between stressful daily events and mood. Eighty-five male white-collar workers completed self-reports 10 times a day for 5 days. Controlling for individual differences in mood levels, multilevel regression analyses showed that events were followed by increases in negative affect (NA) and agitation (Ag) and by decreases in positive affect (PA). More unpleasant events were associated with greater changes in all three mood dimensions; controllability mitigated the effects of events on NA and PA. Prior events had persistent effects on current mood. High perceived stress (PS) was associated with greater reactivity of NA and PA to current events, whereas trait anxiety moderated reactivity of Ag. Results indicate that PS is related not only to a higher frequency of reported events but also to more intense and prolonged mood responses to daily stress.