The influence of mood on the process and content of encoding future intentions

Remembering to perform an intention in the future when some environmental cue is encountered is referred to as event-based prospective memory. The influence of mood on this future-oriented memory is unclear. By experimentally manipulating mood, the current set of experiments sought to examine the influence that differing mood states have on encoding future intentions. Participants were induced into a neutral, positive, or negative mood state at intention formation and returned to their baseline mood before beginning the prospective memory task. Relative to the neutral mood, positive mood facilitated and negative mood impaired intention encoding when neutrally toned cues were used, as evidenced by the proportion of cues subsequently detected. The use of negatively toned cues ameliorated the benefit of the positive mood but not the impairment of the negative mood. Further, reinstatement of the encoding mood during retrieval equated performance for all three mood conditions. Results suggest that encoded mood influences the future accessibility and completion of intended behaviours, perhaps through modulation of associative processing. The current study demonstrates that mood plays a determining role in encoding future intentions.