ABSTRACT
This chapter examines depression, state test anxiety, and comprehension effects in sentence memory as a function of imagery and semantic encoding strategies. In the general experimental literature, the effects of emotional states on memory are currently receiving a great deal of attention. Depression was of interest because of the growth in research on the effects of mood states on learning and memory. An equally important issue is whether anxiety and depression affect memory in similar ways. Depression scores were not significantly correlated with comprehension scores in either encoding condition, although the correlation was positive in the imagery condition and negative in the semantic one. In terms of Beck Depression Inventory depression scores, an interesting pattern of correlations emerged between the two encoding conditions. The depression effects, however, were inconsistent and depended on the nature of the encoding task and task materials.
