EFFECT OF MOOD

The topic is a research project about the effect of mood and gender difference on the semantic distance using text-change detection methods

The topic is a research project about the effect of mood and gender difference on the semantic distance using text-change detection methods

1. Mood and executive functioning

Within our daily lives we can probably all recall instances in which our mood influenced our everyday activities. Normal variations in mood can exert wide-ranging influences on the way in which we behave, including the ways in which we think and act. While intuition might suggest that emotional states impair our ability to control and focus our thoughts, current theories of the relationship between emotion and cognition suggest a more complex pattern (Damasio, 1994 and Gray, 2004). The focus of this review is the psychological and neural mechanisms by which everyday mood fluctuations influence cognitive control or executive functions. This includes cognitive control processes such as planning, attention, decision making, working memory, problem-solving and behavioural control. The potential importance of this topic is further enhanced by arguments that the effects of mood on executive functions may underlie mood effects on other aspects of behaviour such as creativity, social judgements and memory (e.g. Ashby, Isen, & Turken, 1999; Dreisbach & Goschke, 2004; Oaksford, Morris, Grainger, & Williams, 1996; Spies, Hesse, & Hummitzsch, 1996). Any factor that has the power to affect aspects of cognition which are crucial for everyday functioning deserves systematic investigation. Also, there is evidence that brain functional organisation involves the integration of cognitive and mood components (Gray, Braver, & Raichle, 2002), indicating that one cannot be fully understood without the other.

In this review we focus on the effects of mood on executive function. Moods are typically defined as coherent affective states which last for minutes or hours, as compared to emotions, which may typically last for seconds or even fractions of a second (Lazarus, 1994). Moods and emotions can be distinguished on a number of counts: (i) emotions are typically shorter lasting (Watson & Clark, 1994, p. 90), (ii) they are typically more intense than moods (Clore, 1994), (iii) moods typically lack the pronounced facial expressions and changes in autonomic activity associated with emotions, and provide a background to our everyday activities (Alpert & Rosen, 1990), and (iv) whereas emotions are typically caused by a specific event, the reason for being in a particular mood is often unclear (e.g. Ekman, 1999).

2. Scope of the current review and methodological issues

The majority of existing literature on the relationship between mood and executive functions concerns the effects of abnormal mood such as clinical depression or anxiety disorders. We do not intend to review effects of abnormal mood but instead concentrate on the psychological and biological bases of the relationship between normal fluctuations in mood and executive functions. This relationship is likely to influence many aspects of everyday behaviour, and has implications for experimental studies of the psychological and neural bases of cognitive functioning. Most behavioural and neuroimaging studies of executive function in normal ...