Object, Memory and Perception Project

7/31/2019 Object, Memory and Perception Project

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INDIAN INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

ROPAR

HUL 211 Objects, Memory and Perception Project Report

On

Effect of Happy Mood and Happy Mood Congruent Words on

Short Term Memory

Submitted by

Jyotiraj Thakuria (P2009ME1025)

Under the supervision of

Dr. Snehlata Jaswal

Department of Humanities and Social Sciences


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ABSTRACT

Neuroimaging has identified an overlapping network of brain regions whose activity is

modulated by mood and cognition. Studies of depressed individuals have shown changes in

perception and memory. This suggests that mood has a pervasive effect on cognition and

memory. Direct evidence of the effect of happy mood on memory is surprisingly limited,however. This work is concentrated to study the effect of happy mood on mood congruent

memory. In this study, happy mood was induced, enabling the effects of mood to be assessed

for short term memory.

Participants in the happy condition viewed a funny video of several laughing babies while those

in the neutral condition viewed a video that showed a stage show on shadow art. The

participants gave a memory test before and after each video respectively.

The major result as one would expect to be that short term memory on happy mood congruent

words will be enhanced by happy mood was not significant. In fact, the result was opposite to

what was expected. There is a decrease in performance of the total words (both neutral andhappy words) as well as mood congruent words remembered after viewing the videos both for

the happy and the neutral case, but the decrease in performance for total words remembered

for the happy video case was 50 percent less than the decrease in the neutral video case.

The major outcome is that there is no significant effect of happy mood and happy mood

congruent words on short term memory.


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AIM

To study the effect of happy mood and happy mood congruent words on short term memory

INTRODUCTION

Research dating back at least to shows that a persons mood at any given time has a strong

influence on which aspects of the environment seem most salient, on what is remembered

about the past, and on what is encoded about the present episode. The phenomenon in which

emotional material is remembered more reliably in moods that match the emotional content of

the memories. Remembering all of the happy events of our past lives when happy is an

example of mood congruence. Studies of the interaction between mood and memory have

traditionally been limited to the behavioral domain, with little or nothing known about the

neural processes underlying the effect. However, recent neuroimaging studies examining the

influence of emotional context on encoding and retrieval have produced data relevant to thisquestion.

HYPOTHESIS

The expected result for this survey was that the emotional material is remembered more

reliably in mood that matches the emotional content of the memories. In the recall task, the

participants in the happy mood induction group will recall more happy words and fewer neutral

words compared to the recall responses of the neutral mood induction group. The false alarms

produced in the free recall task will also exhibit a mood congruent bias.

METHOD

Participants

NUMBER: 20

AGE: 20-21 years old

GENDER: Males

SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS: College students from different parts of India. The students

belonged to different classes of families.

All participants know English and had normal or corrected to normal vision and hearing.

Stimuli UsedFunny video of several babies laughing, Shadow art video of a stage show.

Software usedMS Excel, MS PowerPoint, SPSS


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DESIGN

The recall task designed composed of a practice block and a test block. The practice block

included 2 happy words, 2 neutral words. The test block included 6 happy words and 6 neutral

words. Each word was presented in black, 40-point, Calibri font, and was written in all capital

letters. All 12 words were presented all at a time, in the center of a white screen for 20 s.Following each trial the participant wrote down as many words as he could remember in any

order on a piece of paper. The time allowed was limited to 2 min in the test trial. Word

responses were scored leniently; words that were spelled incorrectly but could be identified as

being from the presentation of the test list were scored as correct.

The video selected for the happy mood was taken from YouTube showing babies doing funny

things followed by their laughing whereas the video selected for the neutral mood was that of a

stage show in US showing different objects, structures and animals made by shadows of people.

Both the videos were of 3 min each.

The first memory test was followed by any of the two video followed by the second memory

test on the first day of the experiment. On the following day, the other video is shown which is

preceded by the third memory test and succeeded by the fourth memory test.

Counterbalancing

Counter balancing is done by showing the first 10 participants the funny video on the first day

followed by the neutral video on the next day, while the remaining 10 participants were shown

the neutral video on the first day followed by the funny video on the next day.

The four slides shown were also permuted among the participants for counterbalancing.

The happy and neutral words were almost similar in structure among the four test slides.

PROCEDURE

The whole experiment was conducted on a simple DELL STUDIO laptop. The sequence of the

experiment is as follows:

The participants were first given the memory test. They were explained about the memory test

that they should study the words because they would later be asked to write the words on apiece of paper in any order that they choose. The participants were told how many minutes

would be allowed for output at the end of the learning phase. A practice block proceeded the

test block and the participant was encouraged to treat the practice block as if it were the test

block but that their responses on these words would not be scored. The test block shown a

slide containing 12 words out of which 6 were happy words and the rest 6 were neutral words

for 20 seconds. The experimenter remained in the room for this task in order to control the

output time allowed. After a 10 minutes interval, the participants were shown a funny video of


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several babies laughing for 3 minutes in the Dell laptop. Just following this the participants were

given another memory test similar to the first test but with different words. This sequence of

experiment were repeated in the next day but now the participants were shown a neutral

video displaying shadow art at a stage show instead of the happy video and the test words on

the slides were also different from the previous slides. This completes the experiment.

PRECAUTIONS

During the survey, the participants should be made free from any type of distraction. The test words used in each of the four slides should be similar in structure and almost

all should be nouns.

All the test words used should be easy to visualize, so that the participants can easilymake a mental picture of the words shown.

10 minutes interval should be given between the video and the pretest to preventinterference of words between the pretest and posttest.

The other potential participants should not be allowed to view the words in advancefrom the current participants test.

The test should be taken at the same time of the day for all the participants.

RESULTS

Our main aim was to study the effect of happy mood on the short term memory. We started

with the main hypothesis that the participants in the happy mood induction group will recall

more happy words and fewer neutral words compared to the recall responses of the neutral

mood induction group. The whole procedure of obtaining the results in the end consisted of

many tables and graphs which are shown on the following pages.

The results obtained do not support the hypothesis. The effect of happy mood congruent words

has no significant effect on the short term memory. In fact, there was a decrease in the

percentage of words remembered after watching the videos both for the happy video as well as

for the neutral video. But the decrease in performance in memory for the happy video case was

50 percent less than the decrease in performance in memory for the neutral video case.


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TABLE 1

RESPONSES OF 10 DIFFERENT SUBJECTS AFTER 4 TESTS TO WHOM NEUTRALVIDEO WAS SHOWN FIRT FOLLOWED BY HAPPY VIDEO

Serial Subject Test 1

totalwords

Test 1

happywords

Test 2

totalwords

Test 2

happywords

Test 3

totalwords

Test 3

happywords

Test 4

totalwords

Test 4

happywords

1 Shiv 7 3 7 4 8 4 7 2

2 Jay Jain 9 5 5 3 8 5 10 6

3 Aditya 7 3 3 2 7 5 4 2

4 AnujJain

7 2 9 4 7 2 10 4

5 Ankit 8 3 8 4 9 5 8 4

6 Mudit 7 5 4 1 9 4 7 3

7 SumitNimiwal

9 3 9 4 7 5 6 4

8 Saurabh 4 3 5 3 11 5 6 2

9 Manish 5 3 6 3 6 3 3 3

10 Sashwat 7 2 5 2 9 5 8 5


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TABLE 2

RESPONSES OF 10 DIFFERENT SUBJECTS AFTER 4 TESTS TO WHOM HAPPY VIDEOWAS SHOWN FIRT FOLLOWED BY NEUTRALVIDEO

Serial Subject Test 1

totalwords

Test 1

happywords

Test 2

totalwords

Test 2

happywords

Test 3

totalwords

Test 3

happywords

Test 4

totalwords

Test 4

happywords

1 Rajesh

Kumar

5 3 3 2 9 4 5 3

2 Vikas

Yadav

7 2 7 4 7 3 6 3

3 Sajeed. 6 2 7 3 7 2 6 3

4 Shashank 6 3 6 3 9 4 6 3

5 Siddhartha 9 4 8 4 6 3 6 2

6 Sreeraj PJ 7 4 7 3 7 5 7 4

7 Navneet 6 5 4 3 9 3 7 3

8 VikasJawaria

6 4 6 2 5 3 4 3

9 Lal Singh 7 4 6 4 5 3 6 4

10 Mithlesh 4 3 6 3 5 4 3 3


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TABLE 3

COEFFICIENT OF INCREASE OF THE TOTAL WORDS AND HAPPY WORDSREMEMBERED AFTER NEUTRAL VIDEO AS WELL AS AFTER HAPPY VIDEO

Neutral Video Happy Video

Serial No. Coefficient of

Increase of

total words

Coefficient of

Increase of

happy words

Coefficient of

Increase of total

words

Coefficient of

Increase of

happy words

1 -44.444444 -25 -40 -33.333333

2 -14.285714 0 0 100

3 -14.285714 50 16.66666667 50

4 -33.333333 -25 0 0

5 0 -20 0 -33.333333

6 -22.222222 0 -11.11111111 0

7 -20 0 0 -25

8 20 33.3333333 -33.33333333 -40

9 -40 -25 0 -50

10 0 33.3333333 -14.28571429 0

11 -44.444444 -40 50 0

12 -57.142857 -33.333333 -12.5 -50

13 28.571429 100 25 20

14 0 33.3333333 -42.85714286 -60

15 -42.857143 -80 42.85714286 100

16 -22.222222 -25 -11.11111111 -20

17 0 33.3333333 -45.45454545 -60

18 25 0 -50 0

19 20 0 -11.11111111 020 -28.571429 0 -14.28571429 -20

Average Coefficient

of Increase

-14.511905 0.5 -7.223171565 -6.0833333


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TABLE 4

SPSS ANALYSIS OF THE DATA OF THE ABOVE FOUR PARAMETERSTests of Within-Subjects Effects

Measure: MEASURE_1

Source F Sig.

Video Sphericity Assumed .001 .977

Greenhouse-Geisser .001 .977

Huynh-Feldt .001 .977

Lower-bound .001 .977

Error(Video) Sphericity Assumed

Greenhouse-Geisser

Huynh-Feldt

Lower-bound

Words Sphericity Assumed 2.598 .124

Greenhouse-Geisser 2.598 .124

Huynh-Feldt 2.598 .124

Lower-bound 2.598 .124

Error(Words) Sphericity Assumed

Greenhouse-Geisser

Huynh-Feldt

Lower-bound

Video * Words Sphericity Assumed 1.152 .297

Greenhouse-Geisser 1.152 .297

Huynh-Feldt 1.152 .297

Lower-bound 1.152 .297

Error(Video*Words) Sphericity Assumed

Greenhouse-Geisser

Huynh-Feldt

Lower-bound


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GRAPH 1

Subjects response of total words and happy words for the 4 sets of experiments.

GRAPH 2

SPSS graph for getting the significance between the variables.

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Before Neutral Video After Neutral Video Before Happy Video After Happy Video

Total words

Happy words


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DISCUSSIONS

The present work was concentrated to find the effect of happy mood congruent words on short

term memory. But, the recall task showed no significant tendency towards mood congruency,

whereas in prior research a mood congruent effect was found. Of the literature reviewed, two

studies (Knight et al., 2002; Ruiz-Caballero & Gonzlez, 1994) found a significant moodcongruent effect while three did not (Ellis et al., 1995; Ellwart et al., 2003; Gayle, 1997).

In fact in the present study, there was a decrease in the percentage of words remembered after

watching the videos both for the happy video as well as for the neutral video. But an interesting

fact came into light after the experiment that the decrease in performance in memory (total

words) for the happy video case was 50 percent less than the decrease in performance in

memory(total words) for the neutral video case. This may be due to the fact that the

participants get bored after the 1st

test and the attention level decreases, due to which the

performance in memory declines after watching the videos (both happy and the neutral one).

But the decrease in performance is less in case of the happy video, which can be attributed to

the fact that the participants attention somewhat increases due to laughing and thus hisperformance is comparatively better than neutral video case.

LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE MEASURES OF THE STUDYThe inconsistency between the present studies and previous studies could be due to several

factors.

1. The sense of humor of different participants differs from each other, due to which thehappy video shown may induce happiness among some participants while failing to for

the rest. This may be also a reason for mood incongruence.

2. The failure to find a MCM effect in the current research might have been due to the lowparticipant numbers. Indeed, the relatively low participant numbers is a major limitationof the present study.

3. The current work appears to ignore the potential between genders which might be alsoa reason of not finding significant tendency towards mood congruency while some

studies have found a MCM effect. It is rare for the number of female participants to

equal the number of male participants.

4. Failed to include all the three participant groups (sad, neutral, and happy) because itwas considered unethical in the institute to make the participant sad or depressed. If

this can be handled carefully then in the future, a more complete picture of the

phenomenon would be visible.

A final recommendation for future research is to include three participant groups where

possible (sad, neutral, and happy) to gain a more complete picture of the phenomenon under

study. With the suggested protocol amendments, it is possible that the debate over the

existence of a MCM effect could be resolved.


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CONCLUSIONThe study as a whole presented a view that on voluntarily inducing happy mood to people, no

significant increase in memory or specifically mood congruent memory is observed. But, on

inducing happy mood, the attention increases comparatively to some extent, than on inducing

neutral mood.

REFERENCES Ellis, H. C., Seibert, P. S., & Varner, L. J. (1995). Emotion and memory: Effects of mood

states on immediate and unexpected delayed recall. Journal of Social Behavior and

Personality, 10, 349-362.

Bower, G. H. (1981). Mood and memory.American Psychologist, 36, 129-148. Eich, E., &Macaulay, D. (2000). Are real moods required to reveal mood-congruent and mood-

dependent memory? Psychological Science, 11, 244-248.

Fox, L. S., Knight, B. G., & Zelinski, E. M. (1998). Mood induction with older adults: A toolfor investigating effects of depressed mood. Psychology and Aging, 13, 519-523.Retrieved March 23, 2005, from PsycINFO database.

Catherine Ilaria Gross (2006). Bachelor of Psychology thesis on Mood CongruentMemory.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mood-dependent_memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-dependent_memory

APPENDICES

Appendix A: Word list

Happy Word list:

Jelly Honey Angel Butterfly Sparkle Chocolate Sunlight Vanilla Lollipop Sunshine Ice-Cream

Rainbow Flower Balloon Baby Stars Puppies Rose Cherry Holiday Music Song Family Garden

Neutral Word List

Range Rapid Rival Renew Storm Steam Story Sweat Tube Tree Truck Tire Unite Usage Upper

Vodka Vapor Virus Venom Worm Wheat Whale Wrist Actor Angel Angle Chair Clown Cloud

Clock Berry Belt Belly Beam Print Price Press Profit Return Reward Round Review Jewel JailJudge Jump Tiger Spade Book Stone Mouse Glove House Mint Rice Ring Flag Angel Chair

Worm Cloud
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mood-dependent_memoryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mood-dependent_memoryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-dependent_memoryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-dependent_memoryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context-dependent_memoryhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mood-dependent_memory

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