Mood-congruent memory
A given mood makes you recall material whose emotional tone matches it.
What it means
People preferentially retrieve memories whose emotional valence matches their current mood, so a sad mood surfaces sad memories and a happy mood surfaces happy ones. The standard mechanism is associative: an active mood node in memory spreads activation to similarly toned material, raising its accessibility. It is distinct from mood-state-dependent memory, which concerns the match between encoding and retrieval mood regardless of content. Mood-congruent retrieval helps explain why low moods become self-perpetuating in depression and why emotional judgments drift with transient feelings. The effect is more robust for positive moods and for self-referential material than for neutral stimuli.
Examples
When feeling down, a person more readily remembers past failures and slights than past successes.
Asked about a marriage during a happy patch, a spouse reels off a dozen kind gestures. Asked the same question in a rough week, the same person can barely name one.
A shopper browsing in a cheerful mood remembers the shop's helpful staff and the good returns policy, and simply does not think of the delivery that went missing last year.
First described in Gordon Bower (1981).