After a setback at work, memories of being criticised or overlooked may surface one after another, making the whole period seem uniformly bad. This does not necessarily mean that you have suddenly seen the “truth”, nor that the memories are false. Mood-congruent memory is the tendency for a current mood to make material with a similar emotional tone easier to encode or retrieve. When mood is low, negative cues and existing negative memories can activate one another more readily, bringing them into awareness faster.
This differs from mood-dependent memory. The latter concerns whether a similarity between mood at learning and mood at recall helps retrieve what was learned, regardless of whether the content itself was sad. Mood congruence concerns the match between mood and the emotional direction of the material. Neither effect is an on–off switch, and neither means that a bad mood must create bad memories. Findings vary with self-relevance, arousal, task design and participant characteristics. A brief mood induced in a laboratory also does not fully represent everyday emotion or clinical depression.
The main risk to judgement is treating availability as representativeness. The few events easiest to recall now do not automatically reflect the overall distribution of past experience. In a low mood, it is therefore unwise to judge an entire relationship, job or self solely from the most vivid examples in mind. Checking records made at the time, deliberately seeking specific counterexamples, or postponing a global judgement until the mood has shifted can widen the sample without forcing “positive thinking”. Mood changes the lighting at the entrance to memory; it does not organise the whole archive for you.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7224324/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23523539/
https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000394
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