ABSTRACT
Mood dependent memory (MDM) refers to the phenomenon where information that is learned in a particular mood is more easily remembered later on in the presence of a similar mood. As a research topic, MDM has proved to be as exasperating as it is intriguing. From the outset, the research has been plagued by the problem of unreliability. Successful demonstrations of the phenomenon (Bower, 1981; Eich & Metcalfe, 1989; Eich, MacAulay, & Ryan, 1995; Ucros, 1989) have been mixed relatively equally with failures (Bower & Mayer, 1989; Wetzler, 1985), and even attempts at exact replication have yielded varying results (e.g., Bower & Mayer, 1989). These inconsistencies prompted Bower & Mayer (1989) to comment that “we have hit an impasse in our experiments on MDR [mood dependent retrieval].… We can only hope that future research will clarify what now appears to us as a very muddled scene” (pp. 165–166).
