Mood congruence

Mood congruence is a type of recall biased mood congruent memory, not to be mistaken with mood-dependent memory, where an individual's current mood or affective state determines the affective association of the memories that are recalled. In psychology, memories are said to be mood-congruent if they are consistent with a patient's mood or mental disorder. Mental disorders regarding mood congruence are exampled as Clinical Depression or Bi-Polar disorder. An important consideration to the difference between mood congruence and mood dependent (or state-dependent) memory is the determination that one cannot make accurate assumptions about the emotional state of a memory during the encoding process. Therefore, the memory that is recalled is not dependent on the affective state during encoding. Another important difference is that there are multiple memories that can be recalled while in particular mood states that go across contexts and cues that may or may not recall only one specific memory.