doi:10.1016/j.tics.2003.08.009 Mood-dependent memory

Have you ever noticed that when you are in a bad mood the whole world seems to be against you? More nega-tive things seem to happen, and you even remember past episodes of your life in a more negative way than usual. Most of us have experienced this phenomenon, but few will have thought about how this mood might interact with our ability to remember. In a recent paper, Susanne Erk et al. shed light on a possible neural basis for this phenomena. Research dating back at least to 1917 (see [1] for an early review) shows that a person’s 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. Two memory effects relevant to these observations are called moo