ABSTRACT
Social cognition research strongly emphasizes the important role of affective states and provides models of how affective states influence social thinking. This chapter focuses on affective feelings, that is, experienced positivity or negativity. Affective feelings comprise all sorts of valenced experiences, the most prominent of which are emotions and mood states. Affective states may not only influence what information is processed, but also how information is processed. The notion of mood-dependency was first conceptualized in Gordon Bower's associative network model of human memory. Two central hypotheses were derived from Bower's model: First, the state-dependency hypothesis holds that recall is improved when individuals are in the same affective state at encoding and retrieval; Second, the mood-congruent recall hypothesis holds that material is more likely to be recalled if its affective tone matches the individuals' affective state at the time of retrieval.
