Mood congruence
Our current mood colors what we remember and how we judge.
What it means
Mood congruence is the tendency for emotional state to bias cognition toward material that matches it: people more readily encode and later retrieve information whose emotional tone agrees with their current mood, and they interpret ambiguous situations in line with how they feel. Bower's associative-network account offers the mechanism — emotions function as nodes in memory linked to mood-consistent concepts and experiences, so an active mood spreads activation to congruent material, making it more accessible. This produces a self-reinforcing loop, especially for negative states: feeling down primes memories of past failures and pessimistic readings of the present, which deepen and sustain the low mood, a dynamic relevant to depression. It is related to but distinct from mood-state-dependent memory, where recall is best when retrieval mood matches encoding mood regardless of the material's content. It matters because it warps judgments and decisions made while emotional — evaluations of people, risks, satisfaction, and prospects all tilt toward the prevailing mood — and it cautions against making consequential assessments in the grip of a strong feeling.
Examples
When you are in a low mood, you spontaneously recall more of your past failures and rate your future prospects as gloomier than you would on a good day.
A manager writing appraisals straight after a furious commute finds fault with the very work she praised a fortnight ago, and never suspects the traffic had anything to do with it.
The one-line email from your boss saying 'Can we talk?' reads as good news on a cheerful morning and as a warning shot on a flat one. Same words, different mood.
First described in Gordon Bower (1981).