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Need help with my writing homework on Mood Dependent Memory. Write a 1750 word paper answering; The paper shows that in order to assess whether mood dependent memory is in fact supported by these studies and what the potential implications of mood dependent memory could be.

According to Roediger and McDermott (1995), when people are presented with a list of words that are semantically related and asked to recall the words, they will falsely report hearing certain words which were not actually presented – for example, the word “sleep” when presented with a group of words such as “bed”, “rest” “tired” “awake” and “dream”. The word “sleep” for example, is highly associated with the other words and is known as the “critical lure”. Another aspect that influences memory is disassociation where emotions and thoughts may affect memory and may result in cognitive failures. (Wright and Osborne, 2005)

Wright et al (2005) conducted a study to examine two research questions: (a) who is likely to have a false memory? (b) How does this relate to mood, for instance, if a person is in a negative mood, is he more likely to have a false memory? One aspect of their research included testing the impact of mood upon the memory performance by subjecting the participants to musical pieces and hypothesizing that this would affect the memory performance.

The theoretical rationale for this test was the mood-as-input hypothesis put forth by Martin et al (1993). This hypothesis states that there is an interaction between the mood and the extent of memory recall which is determined by the nature of the task, especially where the question of recall of critical lures is concerned. This hypothesis suggests that when people are asked to recall as many words as they “can”, then those in a negative mood are likely to recall more words than those who are in a positive mood. This is because when they are in a negative mood, they may not be satisfied with their performance and feel that they need to keep recalling words, whereas those in a&nbsp.positive mood may be more easily satisfied with their performance and may stop with recalling fewer words.