Henry C. Ellis

Irrelevant thoughts, emotional mood states, and cognitive task performance

In two experiments, we investigated the relationship shared by irrelevant thoughts, emotional mood states, and cognitive task performance. At an empirical level, irrelevant thoughts were defined as thoughts that did not facilitatesuccessful task performance. We used the same general procedure for both experiments: three groups of college students received happy-, neutral- (control), or sad-mood inductions and performed a memory task. The procedure for obtaining thoughts varied between experiments. The subjects in Experiment 1 listed their thoughts after the memory recall task. In Experiment 2, the subjects were tape-recorded while performing a memory task and producing concurrent verbal protocols. The subjects in both experiments then judged their thoughts in terms of frequency, intensity,and irrelevance. Wefound a similar pattern of results in both experiments: (1) The proportions ofirrelevant thoughts and recall performance were -negatively related, and (2) happy and sad studentsproduced reliably greater proportions of irrelevant thoughts than did neutral (control) students.

Emotional mood states, strategies, and state-dependency in memory

The effects of experimentally induced mood states on recall and chunking of letter sequences were examined in two experiments. Both experiments focused on the role of depressed mood induction on recall, the interaction between mood and varied versus repetitious spatial groupings of letter sequences, and transfer of coding strategies. In addition, state-dependent retention effects of mood state were examined in the second experiment. Depressed mood hindered both recall and chunking. The mood state induced on day 1 recall determined subsequent recall of a new list 24 hours later, indicating the transfer of coding strategies. State-dependent retention effects were obtained only with delayed recognition. Mood effects on recall are discussed in terms of cognitive rigidity and interference which result in reduced task-relevant processing capacity and/or reduced cognitive effort for task-specific demands.

The Assessment of Dispositional Vigilance and Cognitive Avoidance: Factorial Structure, Psychometric Properties, and Validity of the Mainz Coping Inventory

This article reports the construction and empirical evaluation of the English adaptation of the Mainz Coping Inventory (MCI). The MCI, which is based on the model of coping modes (Krohne, 1993), is organized as a stimulus–response inventory and contains two subtests. Eight fictitious situations are presented to the participants. Four of these situations represent physical threat (subtest MCI-P) and four ego threat (subtest MCI-E). Each situation is conjoined with five vigilant and five cognitive avoidant coping strategies, thus allowing the separate assessment of the coping dispositions of vigilance and cognitive avoidance. Analyses concerning appraisals of the threat situations, factorial structure, and psychometric properties of the MCI as well as convergent and discriminant associations with coping and affect variables are presented. Results of the analyses indicate that the MCI is a reliable and valid measure of two central coping dimensions.

Emotion, motivation, and text comprehension : The detection of contradictions in passages

The authors investigated the effects of experimentally induced mood states on the identification of contradictions in text passages and ratings of comprehension in 3 experiments. Mood impaired comprehension in college students across a variety of passages, as evidenced by a depressive impairment in contradiction identification and an increased number of false identifications among depressed participants. Additionally, depressed individuals were less accurate in their judgments of passage difficulty. These findings are consistent with the resource allocation model of mood effects, which attributes impaired comprehension to the activation of intrusive, irrelevant thoughts during reading of the passage. It is further argued that these results cannot be explained simply by a deficit in motivation of the depressed participants.

A convenient self-referencing mood induction procedure

We describe a brief, convenient, and effective procedure for experimentally inducing mood states in the laboratory that are especially useful in the study of cognition and emotion. The procedure is like that of Velten’s (1968) in that a verbal self-instructional procedure is used to induce a temporary mood state. It differs from Velten’s in that the mood induction items contain current language usage familiar to typical college undergraduates, contain no reference to potential cognitive processing deficits or strategies that may either interfere with or facilitate performance on some criterion cognitive task, contain no reference to suicidal or somatic states, and is briefer than Velten’s procedure in that only 25, rather than 60, items are employed. Validation of the mood induction procedure demonstrated that the induction procedures were effective, as assessed by a depression adjective checklist (DACL), and that the induction of both sad and happy moods produced poorer recall than did a neutral mood control.

Stimulus Encoding Processes in Human Learning and Memory1

Publisher Summary This chapter examines a particular class of problems, which can be subsumed under stimulus coding. It evaluates the role of verbal processes in the encoding of visual pattern and verbal stimuli in the context of recognition, recall, and transfer experiments. A diverse number of task situations is examined, all of which focus on how human subjects process stimulus information in learning tasks, thus providing a range of situations in which to evaluate several interpretations of stimulus encoding. In the investigation of stimulus encoding processes, the objective or nominal stimuli defined by an investigator must be clearly distinguished from the coded or functional stimuli to which a subject responds. The codes are often verbal, but they may involve other representations such as mental images. Conceivably, subjects may use alternative codes for the same nominal stimuli on different occasions. Studies of verbal pretraining reveal that practice in associating common responses to stimuli of a given class produce a less distinctive encoding of these stimuli, as reflected in their poorer recognition compared with control conditions. Studies of verbal pretraining using stimulus recognition tests yield results which do not mirror the findings obtained with transfer tests employing the A-B, A-D paradigm.

Emotion and prior knowledge in memory and judged comprehension of ambiguous stories

Abstract Two experiments investigated the effects of experimentally induced mood states on memory and judged comprehension of stories. The experiments examined the issue of whether induction of a depressed mood would affect prose memory and comprehension and impair the ability of individuals to use prior knowledge, activated by way of a title, in remembering the passage. In Experiment 1, depressed subjects who were given a title for the passage recalled fewer idea units when compared with neutral control conditions, but no depressive deficit in recall occurred in the absence of a title. In Experiment 2 the same pattern of results occurred when subjects learned two successive passages. The depressive deficits obtained were interpreted in terms of a resource allocation model which proposes that emotional states increase the production of irrelevant, competing thoughts that interfere with processes important in remembering the criterion passage. Alternative explanations involving cognitive initiative and sch...

Cognitive activity and physiological arousal: Processes that mediate mood-congruent memory

This research proposes that the cognitive activity associated with the experience of an emotional state mediates the occurrence of mood-congruent processing. Two experiments examined the role of cognitive activity in selective processing of words in a mood congruence paradigm. Four induction procedures were used: a depressed-mood induction, a schema induction organized around the theme of writing a paper, an arousal induction, and a control neutral-mood induction. The memory task consisted of recalling a word list composed of negatively associated and thematically organized words. Selective processing was demonstrated in conjunction with the depressed-mood and organizational-schema induction procedures. In contrast, the arousal and neutral induction procedures did not produce selective processing of words from the list. The findings support the thesis that cognitive activity mediates the selective processing typical of mood congruence as distinct from arousal processes per se. The findings are discussed with respect to the resource allocation model and semantic network theory.

Mood state effects on thought listing

Using a thought-listing procedure, we investigated the kinds of thoughts experienced by individuals who have undergone experimental mood induction. The results of Experiment 1, in which neutral- and depressed-mood-induction groups were compared, showed that individuals who had received a depressed-mood induction rated significantly more of their thoughts as unfavorable. In Experiment 2, subjects were required to engage in a cognitive task before the thought-listing procedure; the experiment included an elated-mood-induction group, as well as neutral and depressed groups. Although effects were in the expected direction, no reliable differences were found among the three groups in the proportion of unfavorable thoughts listed.

Memory and personality: external versus internal locus of control and superficial organization in free recall

This research examined the effects of having both a semantic and a superficial perceptual category for organizing lists of words in free recall, and also examined the effects of a personality variable, locus of control, on susceptibility to superficial featuers. When given an option to encode both semantic adn superficial features, subjects with an external locus of control encoded the superficial features more extensively than internals; in addition, with this option externals showed poorer free recall. When only semantic cues were present, no difference in recall or clustering occurred between internals and externals. The data are interpreted in terms of differences in ease of distraction, with externals being less able to distinguish relevant semantic from less pertinent perceptual features.